I'd like to propose that urban Indian women, living in the intersections of urbanity and gender, incite an enhanced sort of settler state panic because they both signal the reproduction of Nativeness despite efforts at elimination and upset the colonial dream of the reservation that attempts to contain and manage Indian peoples in spaces that are able to be carefully surveilled and controlled. Likewise, the anxiety these women invoke reveals, yet again, fear of outbreak. That is, outbreak understood as unfettered Native fecundity spilling into the so-imagined pure and non-Native landscape of urban America. Native women reproducing unabashedly across “Indian country” are threatening enough, but urban Native women infesting and contaminating such seemingly untainted Euro-American spaces as the city are an extra-ordinary threat indeed. Hence, the urban Indian woman has been figured as a particularly dangerous enemy within, as one who poses a biopolitical problem for the state, but more significantly, exposes the imperfections (perhaps impotence) of colonialism and, thus, necessitates elimination. With the TLOA, we witness multiple processes of elimination. First of all, there is a symbolic erasure of urban Indian women in the legislation's refusal to include the urban Indian population in its discussion of violence against Native women. The TLOA's sole focus on tribal communities (without inclusion of culturally hybrid/ambiguous urban communities) eases its own anxiety over the precarious distinction between Native and non-Native but eclipses the realities of Native existence. It would be difficult, however, for the settler state to continue to criminalize and demonize Native peoples, as the TLOA does, without also potentially criminalizing and demonizing itself if it admits to the existence of (perhaps culturally and biologically mixed) urban Indian populations.

Secondly, there is a literal elimination of urban Indian women that results from the

TLOA's symbolic erasure of them. Since this population is not included in the legislation's scope, these women will not benefit from the (albeit problematic) provisions of the Act aimed at addressing violence against Native women. Just as with Title IX of the VAWA, urban Indian women will not be recipients of increased awareness, funding, policing efforts, etc. provided by the Act. Thus, the violence committed against them (intimately intertwined with the goals of genocide) will be allowed to continue with impunity, to flourish even, as it remains hidden deep in the recesses of settler colonialism. In this way, urban Indian women's lives will continue to be lost.

Notably, however, even though the TLOA refuses to acknowledge urban Indian women, it does not completely ignore the tangled web of Native identity, cultural hybridity, mobility, and violence. It excludes urban Indian women from its agenda even as it also moves to maintain control over determining who is and is not considered to be Indian. As illustrated above, this is done primarily through its attachment to the IACAA, which blatantly reaffirms the state's control over the boundaries of Indian identity, but it is also done through its production of a carefully delineated portrait of the “authentic Native victim” it purports to save. In other words, the TLOA also enacts an ideological obliteration of urban Indian women in the ways in which it suggests that only particular Native women, in particular geo-political locations, legitimately deserve services and efforts to end violence against them. Like Title IX of the VAWA that precedes it, the TLOA's primary focus on tribal lands, tribal governments, and tribal courts securely fastens Indian identity, once again, to restrictive, white-supremacist notions of Indianness so that it can continue to contain, regulate, and surveille Native women, the reproduction of Native communities, and our understandings of Native identity.

The latter is itself an act of violence that cannot be underestimated in its potential to further the project of settler colonialism. For it is of this violence my daughter spoke of when she voiced her concerns over her own relationship to Nativeness. In only a few brief words and after living under settler colonialism for only seven years, Estella articulated what could be considered the most significant manifestation of violence against urban Indian women -- the settler state's alienation of us from our communities and denial of our identities as Native. Such ideological violence serves to further fragment and thus more easily disappear Native communities. It also severely limits the extent to which we will be able to understand and heal from the physical violence perpetrated against us as well as our ability to envision a decolonizing project that truly embraces Nativeness as it exists in its myriad forms.

Conclusion

My purpose in interrogating the TLOA is not to suggest that we abandon the legislation as it is currently written or that we indict those who contributed to the implementation of it and/or continue to support it. Rather, with this reading, I urge us to refrain from thinking of the TLOA, like the SDCADVSA or Title IX, as “the answer” to violence against Native women and to consider it as one of the many strategies (despite its imperfections) we might need to take up in the project of decolonizing our Native nations and restoring bodily integrity to our communities. Moreover, with my examination of the work the TLOA does to extinguish even the idea of urban Indian women when addressing violence against Native women, I advocate that we seriously consider the settler state's fear of urban Indian women. That is, I recommend that we explore the potential for understanding even the existence of urban Indian women as a possibility for rearticulating Indianness in a way that opens up rather than restricts our communities and increases the number of us who may be invested in projects of decolonization and resistance to the colonial project of Indigenous elimination. Lynn Rosenthal, “The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010: A Step Forward for Native

Women,” The White House Blog, posted July 29, 2010,

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/07/29/tribal-law-and-order-act-2010-a-step-forwardnative-women (accessed September 13, 2011).

The definition of Indian Country is set forth by federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1151) as follows: “(a) all land within the limits of any Indian reservation under the jurisdiction of the United States Government, notwithstanding the issuance of any patent, and, including rights-of-way running through the reservation, (b) all dependent Indian communities within the borders of the United States whether within the original or subsequently acquired territory thereof, and whether within or without the limits of a State, and (c) all Indian allotments, the Indian titles to which have not been extinguished, including rights-of-way running through the same.” As discussed in Chapter Two, such an understanding of Indian Country is highly problematic and limits the scope of any legislation that relies upon it.

Rosenthal.

Gale Toensing, “Obama Signs `Historic' Tribal Law and Order Act,” Indian Country Today,

July 30, 2010, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2010/07/obama-signs-

%e2%80%98historic%e2%80%99-tribal-law-and-order-act/ (accessed September, 13, 2011).

As discussed in Chapter Two, the three locations chosen as sites of research for the report are significant. In various ways, these locations coincide with, rather than challenge, hegemonic understandings of “Indian Country” and contribute to the belief that violence against Native women is something that occurs in remote, Indian locations beyond the reach of civilized “law and order.”

Amnesty International, Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA (New York: Amnesty International USA, 2007).

Amnesty International, Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA: One Year Update (New York: Amnesty International USA, 2008),

As discussed in Chapter Two, the “trust responsibility” the U.S. government has to Native nations, like “law and order,” is frequently invoked to call for better “protection” and treatment of Native peoples by the settler state. Rarely discussed, however, are the colonial ideologies underplay in such a relationship that defines the United States as the “guardian” of the Native “ward” or that situates indigenous communities as inferior to and under the eye of the settler state in their position as “domestic dependent Nations.” When considered in this context, the “trust responsibility” of the United States is not confused as a responsibility to ensure that Native peoples are treated equally under the law but rather understood as a responsibility to maintain the unequal and inferior position of Native peoples in relation to the settler state.

Amnesty International, Maze of Injustice.

Jessica Yee, “How Native Women Built the Tribal law and Order Act.” Ms. Magazine Blog, posted February 7, 2011, http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/08/03/the-woman-behind-thetribal-law-and-order-act/ (accessed September 13, 2011).

Ibid.

Byron Dorgan from the Committee on Indian Affairs, The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2009, S. Rep. No. 111-93, at 4 (2009).

Examining the Prevalence of and Solutions to Stopping Violence Against Indian Women, Hearing Before the Committee on Indian Affairs, 110^th Cong. (September 27, 2007) (statement of Jami Rozell, Educator-Survivor Citizen).

“Signing the Tribal law and Order Act,” White House video, 14:38, July 29, 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/signing-tribal-law-and-order-act.

Toensing.

Gideon Hart, “A Crisis in Indian Country: An Analysis of the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010,” Regent University Law Review 23 (2010): 141.

Ibid.

Suzianne Painter-Thorne, “Tangled Up in Knots: How Continued Federal Jurisdiction over Sexual Predators on Indian Reservations Hobbles Effective Law Enforcement to the Detriment of Indian Women,” New Mexico Law Review 41 (2011): 5.

Examining S. 797, the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2009, Hearing Before the Committee on Indian Affairs, 111^th Cong. (June 25, 2009) (testimony of Troy Eid, Attorney) 25.

Ibid.

Ibid., 26.

H.R. 1924, The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2009, Hearing Before the Committee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, 111^th Cong. (December 10, 2009) (statement of Thomas Perelli, Associate Attorney General).

For numerous examples of such descriptions, please see, among others, the H.R. 1924, The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2009 testimonies before the Committee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, 11^th Cong. (December 10, 2009).

H.R. 1924, The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2009, Hearing Before the Committee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, 111^th Cong. (December 10, 2009) (statement of Thomas Perelli, Associate Attorney General).

Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (2009): 415.

Sheila Regan, “Tribal Law and Order Act's XI addresses Indian Women Sexual Assault,”

Twin Cities Daily Planet, October 27, 2010, http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/news/2010/10/27/tribal-law-and-order-act%E2%80%99s-xiaddresses-indian-women-sexual-assault-issues (accessed September 16, 2011).

Michael Riley, “Promises, Justice Broken: A Dysfunctional System Let's Serious Reservation Crimes go Unpunished and Puts Indians at Risk,” The Denver Post, November 11, 2007, http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_7429560 (accessed September 16, 2011).

Ibid.

Even in cases where the perpetrators' ethnicity is unmentioned, however, they are often referred to in terms of their “relation” to their victims which implies they are Native.

Amnesty International, Maze of Injustice, 4.

Painter-Thorne, 53.

³²When it was originally enacted in 1968, the Indian Civil Rights Act was passed to “protect” the civil rights of Native peoples from being infringed upon by tribal governments. Many argue, however, that this Act is yet another erosion of tribal sovereignty because it requires Native nations to conceptualize individual civil rights on terms set by the federal government and it restricts the manner in which Native nations can govern their peoples. For example, the initial provisions limited tribes to sentencing offenders for no more than 6 months of imprisonment and/or a $500 fine. In 1986, as part of the “War on Drugs,” the United States increased these limits to the 1 yr and/or $5,000 limits. It could be argued that each time these sentencing capacities are increased, it is done so in the interest of the settler state.

Notably, the underlying logic here is similar to the logic of overturning Oliphant. Again, it suggests that if Native peoples assent to the settler state, they will be rewarded with increased “recognition” and the granting of so-called sovereign rights - that is, the right to act in accordance with US laws and worldviews.

Toensing.

Paul Schmelzer, “Bachmann Votes Against Act to Help Native American Police Combat Rape `Epidemic',” The Minnesota Independent, July 28, 2010, http://minnesotaindependent.com/61865/bachmann-votes-against-bill-to-help-native-americanpolice-combat-rape-epidemic (accessed September 16, 2011).

Painter-Thorne, 44.

Luana Ross, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 14.

Ibid., 16.

Ibid., 29.

For related discussions of the criminalization of marginalized peoples see Jeffrey Ross and

Larry Gould, eds., Native Americans and the Criminal Justice System (Boulder: Paradigm

Publishers, 2006); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and

Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, eds., Queer (In)Justice: The Criminilization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011).

Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 401.

Ibid., 402.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 31.

Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005), 3.

Ibid.

Ibid., 10.

Lisa Poupart, “The Familiar Face of Genocide: Internalized Oppression Among American Indians,” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 87.

Eileen Hudon, interview by author, St. Paul, Minnesota, July, 28, 2010.

Ibid.

Poupart, 89.

Smith, Conquest, 13.

The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010, H.R. 725 (2010).

For detailed discussions of this issue, see Luana Ross, Inventing the Savage: The Social

Construction of Native American Criminality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Stormy Ogden, “Pomo Woman, Ex-Prisoner, Speaks Out,” in Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology eds. Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge: South End Press, 2006); and Jeffrey Ross and Larry Gould, eds., Native Americans and the Criminal Justice System (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006).

Indian Arts and Crafts Board, “The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990,” U.S. Department of the Interior online, http://www.doi.gov/iacb/act.html.

Indian Arts and Crafts Board, “The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1935,” U.S. Department of the Interior online, http://www.doi.gov/iacb/iaca35.html.

Indian Arts and Crafts Board, “Arts and Crafts Act of 1990.”

Ibid.

Certainly, the passing of the IACAA also speaks to the United States economic interest in controlling the production and circulation of “Indian” goods as is illustrated in the legislative testimony of Larry Parkinson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Law Enforcement Security and Emergency Management. In his statement before the House Natural Resources Committee on December 2, 2009, Parkinson asserted that the IACAA “would make a significant impact on the federal government's ability to combat the flood of counterfeit Indian arts and crafts being misrepresented as Indian and dramatically eroding a critical component of Indian economies and a genuine American treasure-?-? Indian art.” (emphasis mine)

Joanna Barker, “Indian™ U.S.A.,” Wicazo Sa Review 18, no.1, (2003): 27.

Ibid., 32.

For further discussion of this topic, see Jon Parsley, “Regulation of Counterfeit Indian Arts and Crafts: An Analysis of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990,” American Indian Law Review 18, no. 2 (1993): 487-514; Joshua Haynes, “Constructing Authenticity: The Indian Arts and Crafts Board and the Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1935-1985,” Native South 3 (2010): 1-38; and the visual art of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, http://www.hulleah.com/.

Barker, “Indian™ U.S.A.,” 32.

Scott Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 49.

Ibid.

Ibid., 38.

Ibid., 60.

U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000.

Teresa Evans-Campbell, Taryn Lindhorst, Bu Huang, and Karina Walters, “Interpersonal Violence in the Lives of Urban American Indian and Alaska Native Women: Implications for Health, Mental Health, and Help-Seeking,” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 8 (2006):

Urban Indian Health Institute, Reproductive Health of Urban American Indian and Alaska Native Women: Examining Unintended Pregnancy, Contraception, Sexual History and Behavior, and Non-Voluntary Sexual Intercourse, (Seattle: Urban Indian Health Board, 2010), 34.

Rose Clark and Carrie Johnson, “Overview of Issues Facing Native Women Who Are

Survivors of Violence in Urban Communities” in Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence, eds. Sarah Deer, Bonnie Clairmont, Carrie Martell, and Maureen White Eagle (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2008), 89.

Ibid., 87-88.

Ibid., 90.

Ibid., 94-96.

Phil Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 7.

Ibid., 21.

Ibid.

Ibid., 27.

Ibid., 26.

Ibid., 28.

Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 46.

Ibid., 52.

Renya Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 21.

Ibid., 52.

Recent examples of this can be seen in the National Museum of the American Indian's

September 16, 2011 symposium “Quantum Leap: Does `Indian Blood' Still matter?” as well as Native America Calling's January 3, 2011 broadcast “Native Matchmaking.”

Angela Gonzales, “Urban (Trans)Formations: Changes in the Meaning and Use of American Indian Identity” in American Indians and the Urban Experience, eds. Susan Lobo and Kurt Peters (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2001), 169.

Inez Hernandez-Avila, “In Praise of Insubordination, or What Makes a Good Woman Go Bad?” in Transforming a Rape Culture, ed. Emilie Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1993), 386.

Smith, Conquest, 107.

Conclusion. Unchartered Territory: Native Feminist Reconceptualizations

In the early Saturday morning hours of June 25, 2011, my daughter and I waited in the quiet and rather desolate Dallas/Ft. Worth airport for a connecting flight to Tulsa, Oklahoma from which we would head out to our nation's annual festival in Okmulgee. We were spread out across the floor, Estella snacking on McDonald's and myself flipping through the Muscogee Nation News trying desperately to stay awake until we boarded the plane as we'd already been travelling since nine o'clock the night before. As I was searching for the festival's schedule of events, I came across a letter to the editor titled “Citizen Remarks on April 15 Photograph” wherein which a concerned and rather irritated citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation inquired about a photo that had appeared in the April 15^th issue of the newspaper.¹ The photo under attack accompanied the article, “Into the Clear Blue: April Marks Child Abuse Prevention

Month” and was captioned, “Pictured above are the children from the local Muscogee (Creek) Nation Office of Child Care and Head Start programs who participated in a balloon release in recognition of national Child Abuse Awareness Month in April.” Accordingly, it pictured a group of children and two adults releasing light blue balloons into the sky.²

The “concerned” Muscogee letter writer was writing to demand an explanation of the photo for in his opinion, the picture “did not show an Indian face.”³ He angrily and sarcastically asked, “Where are the Muscogee (Creek) Children? Were they sick that day?”⁴ He goes on to report the demographics of the children who participate in said programs (six mixed-bloods, four whites, one black, and 70 Native) before closing his letter by woefully asserting, “We Native

Americans, are forgotten, even in our own paper, within our own tribal boundaries.”⁵

Before I could really even begin to process my thoughts and feelings about this so-called concerned citizen's remarks, I found myself further overwhelmed by the newspaper's response to his letter. The entire opening paragraph of the letter of response, titled “Staff Responds to April 15 Photograph,” warrants recounting: “The cover photo from the April 15, 2011 edition of the Muscogee Nation News shows three Indian boys among the group of children releasing balloons. Although there are no full facial shots, there are three brown-skinned Indian boys included in the photo. One is shown looking at the camera, one has his arms outstretched upward and another is looking to the sky as the balloons ascend. The children, parents and staff were standing in mixed groups, so picking out a purely Indian group was not possible.”⁶ The response then continues to justify the photo by explaining that the balloon release itself happened very quickly and pictures had to be taken in matters of seconds to capture the action of the event. Unfortunately, “the digital camera did not recharge quickly enough to capture as many brownskinned Creek faces releasing their balloons.”⁷ Furthermore, it is added, the printing process used for the newspaper alters color and makes it difficult to correctly ascertain skin tone.⁸ After presenting this lengthy and varied defense, the piece ends with the following assertion: “The Muscogee heritage has a history of inter-racial families. It would not be right to discriminate against a child because of skin color. Child abuse observes no skin color boundaries, so maybe we shouldn't either.”⁹

As I finished reading the two letters, I glanced over at my daughter and then back at myself. We would definitely be included among the faces that are not quite brown enough to be printed in the Muscogee Nation News. I then thought about some of the personal experiences I recounted in earlier chapters of this dissertation. No wonder my own boyfriend doesn't quite recognize me as Indian and my daughter too questions her identity, for it would seem that even the Muscogee Nation has adopted settler colonial ideologies that might challenge our claims to indigeneity. This is a humble but poignant example of the issue I would like to engage in the concluding chapter of Un-Settling Questions - the indigenous reproduction of biopolitical logics.

Throughout this dissertation I have attempted to demonstrate a variety of ways in which the settler state utilizes biopolitical logics to perpetuate the violence of colonialism and the elimination of the Native through the erasure and marginalization of particular indigenous populations - namely, urban Indian women. I have done so to combat and problematize current narratives and discourses that would argue the exact opposite - that the settler state, with its seemingly current embrace of equality and liberal multiculturalism, has turned away from the persecution of indigenous peoples and now works to re-right past wrongs and renew efforts to “save the Indian” from the depths of his/her despair. My purpose in undertaking such a task arises from my conviction that such an argument, or the uncritical praise of settler colonial initiatives such as the SDCADVSA, Title IX of the VAWA, and the TLOA it encourages, drastically impedes projects of decolonization and Native nation-building. Yes, as I've demonstrated, each of these initiatives has improved the lives of some Native peoples to some degree yet they have also operated as colonizing tricks intended to placate the Native in order to more effectively eliminate indigeneity.

I cannot in good conscience, however, end my analysis here. For perhaps a far greater threat to decolonization efforts is the degree to which Native nations have come to adopt the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism. Let me be clear though. I do not broach this difficult topic to air dirty Indian laundry and I do not presume that the brief remarks I will make do justice to interrogating the complexities of this issue. Rather, I initiate a conversation of this sort both to emphasize the significance of the project at hand and to signal its limitations. That is to say, I have intended Un-Settling Questions to do precisely that which the title suggests - to ask questions that un-settle our current understandings of the relationship between the settler state and violence against Native women. I have attempted to do so, primarily, through an engagement with and a broadening of the current discourse surrounding the relationship between biopolitics, indigeneity, and the settler state. In some ways, however, this dissertation might be considered “predictable” in that it likens the settler state to John Wayne in its never-ending attempt to colonize the Indian. Nevertheless, I chose to pursue such a project because I remain convicted that a thorough understanding of settler colonialism (in its myriad forms) is vital to any project of decolonization (such as the eradication of violence against Native women). This, I believe, is the strength of Un-Settling Questions. It suggests that we more carefully interrogate the price of working with the settler state. Furthermore, it attempts to reconceptualize the discourse surrounding violence against Native women by refusing to characterize this issue as an “Indian problem” and by instead positioning colonialism as the problem.

Arguably, however, that which is the strength of Un-Settling Questions is also its limitation. For, again, this focus on the workings of colonialism frames colonialism as the bad guy and the Indian as the good guy. While I believe this is entirely accurate to a degree, I also believe that the story is a bit more complicated. For as my vignette illustrates, indigenous peoples are not entirely immune to the persuasion of biopolitical logics. In some instances, such logics have invaded our ways of thinking and our ways of asserting nationhood. The Muscogee Creek citizen who admonishes the Muscogee Nation News for failing to “accurately” and exclusively represent brown-skinned Muscogee children is a striking example of this. Clearly, he has internalized settler colonial ideologies that equate skin tone (and, it can be inferred, blood quantum) rather than political affiliation, cultural practice, etc. with Indianness. That is, as I argue in chapter two, he has succumbed to the logic that explains indigeneity as a thing one is rather than something one does. His woeful final comment that Native peoples are forgotten even

“within our own tribal boundaries”¹⁰ further illustrates his employment of settler colonial logics. The Muscogee Creek people do not live on original tribal lands. Those of us living within the current jurisdiction of the Creek Nation live on lands that are no longer even considered reservation lands but to which the United States relocated us.¹¹ To privilege such geopolitically constructed space as the location of Creekness, like I argue in chapter two, is extremely violent.

The Muscogee Nation News' response to this citizen is just as demonstrative of the degree to which Native peoples have internalized settler colonial understandings of Indianness. Nine-tenths of the response is not a refutation of the citizen's assumptions but rather a defense of why brown-skinned Indians are missing from the picture. This serves not to negate the equation of skin tone with authentic Indian identity but to further reinforce it. The way in which the socalled Indian children they do identify are described is likewise violent in its objectification of their bodies, describing the exact positions in which they appear (arms outstretched, etc.) and their phenotypes as if they are lifeless beings of an anthropological study. Hence, the final three sentences of the response, which suggest that perhaps readers should be more concerned with the issue of child abuse than with the color of a child's skin, read like an afterthought that was hastily attached to the letter in case any of the children pictured “really are” Creeks.

Sadly, the Muscogee Creek Nation is not alone in its employment of colonialist ideologies. As a matter of fact, the story I have narrated above is a rather humble example of such matters. Scholars such as Jennifer Denetdale, Mark Rifkin, and Joanne Barker have written extensively about indigenous internalization and utilization of the settler colonial logics of exclusion, marginalization, and elimination.¹² For example, in “Carving Navajo National Boundaries: Patriotism, Tradition, and the Diné Marriage Act of 2005,” Jennifer Denetdale interrogates the Diné legislation that restricts marriage to heterosexual couples. She argues that rather than codify a specifically Diné understanding of sexuality and gender, the Act actually denies Diné “tradition” (evidenced in creation stories and stories of the thirdly-gendered nádleehí) and embraces American gender ideologies. The significance of such legislation is immense as “the conflation of Navajo traditional values with mainstream American values gives credence to the multicultural narrative that America has created about itself and renders invisible the links between the past and the present, wherein Native peoples still live with the consequences of dispossession and disenfranchisement.”¹³ Thus, Denetdale argues that the Diné Marriage Act works in the same way that I have argued legislation such as the VAWA and the TLOA work to manufacture a multicultural American narrative that erases the violence of colonialism. The critical difference here is that the Diné Marriage Act emerges not from the settler state but from a Native nation.

Similarly, in “Native Nationality and the Contemporary Queer: Tradition, Sexuality, and History in Drowning in Fire,” Mark Rifkin explores same-sex marriage legislation passed by the

Navajo and Cherokee Nations. Through a critical reading of Craig Womack's Creek novel Drowning in Fire, Rifkin demonstrates the degree to which “current articulations of Creek nationality remain burdened by the imperial imperative to institutionalize a certain version of normality as a condition of being recognized as a polity by the United States,”¹⁴ particularly as that so-called normality manifests as the compulsive heteronuclearity. Rifkin's positioning of the Indian civilization, allotment, and education programs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as sites through which “the U.S. government has sought to enforce Christian heteronuclearity as the structuring principle of social order, constructing and regulating zones of privacy in order to produce a social landscape denuded of forms of collectivity that could contest expansionism and capitalist development”¹⁵ undergirds the analysis of the reservation era that I posit in chapter two. I argue that the reservation can also be read as a colonially constructed and highly regulated zone tasked with the domestication of the Native. The imposition of the heteronuclear family and the dissolution of kinship networks were essential to this process as was the privatization and pathologization of the reservation “home.” Sadly, it is this colonially imposed logic of heteronormativity that nations such as the Cherokee, Creek, and Navajo build upon in developing same-sex marriage legislation. Like the reservation and settler state definitions of indigenous identity, heteronormativity has come to be naturalized, embraced, and fiercely protected by Native nations. And, like the urban Indian women who defy the borders of the reservation and settler state definitions of indigenous identity, those Native peoples who defy the heteronormative imperative become excluded from the Native nation.

I have mentioned the complexity of understanding the indigenous employment of

biopolitical logics a couple of times already, but it warrants mentioning again. This process is intimately connected to the politics of recognition best understood as the catch-22 situation in which indigenous peoples must appeal to the settler state, on its terms and through its logics of colonial spatialization, the regulation of Indian identity, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, for recognition as Native peoples. Clearly, such a situation dictates the parameters by which Native peoples can articulate their identities, cultures, and nationhoods. That is, in order to be recognized as authentic Indian tribes, Native peoples must present themselves as recognizable (in other words, reservation-bound, countable and identifiable things who have succumbed to settler colonial logics) to the colonial apparatus. Unfortunately, as Joanne Barker posits, “these conditions are about the effectiveness of U.S. national narrations at maintaining Native dominance on the grounds of U.S. superiority and a Native inferiority that simultaneously codifies Native authenticity as a particular kind of cultural continuity, cohesiveness, and distinction.”¹⁶

Understanding the violently difficult and restricted position the game of federal recognition puts Native peoples in can be maddening. It has provoked me to such anger and despair that, at times, I have denounced processes of recognition, indigenous identification, and the project of decolonization altogether. I have felt paralyzed by these emotions, convinced that our Native hands are tied, that we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, damned if we do and damned if we don't. Yet, I have also come to believe that these feelings and experiences, or to use the words of Dian Million, this “felt theory” can be employed to mount “significant political interventions or counterhegemonic moves.”¹⁷ Our voices, our lives, and the stories we choose to tell, as Native women, have the potential to contribute to the project of decolonization: “Our voices rock the boat and perhaps the world. They are dangerous.”¹⁸ And they are the foundation from which a Native feminist analytic that has the “ability to speak to ourselves, to inform ourselves and our generations, to counter and intervene in a constantly morphing colonial system,”¹⁹ emerges.

It is toward this Native feminist analytic, which I outlined in the introductory chapter of this project, that I would now like to turn for it is within a Native feminist discourse that I locate the potential to dismantle the colonial mappings and white supremacist, heteropatriarchal logics that insist on fracturing Native communities in efforts to eliminate indigeneity. Inspired by methodologies employed by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, I make this move in order to suggest a prolineal genealogy of the relationship between violence against Native women and our understandings of indigeneity.²⁰ That is, I posit that a Native feminist analytic aids us not only in interrogating the current state of the relationship between violence against Native women and the construction of indigeneity but also in conceptualizing a counterhegemonic and decolonized future relationship between the two.

In particular, I would like to consider Mishuana Goeman's development and articulation of a Native feminist spatial practice for its potential to reshape the discourse surrounding violence against Native women. Goeman argues that a Native feminist spatial practice can and should “address colonial mappings of bodies and land and remap our social and political lives according to cultural values and contemporary needs;”²¹ “(re)invent new stories and branch into the past, present, and future;”²² and “call into question and disorient colonial narrations of “authentic” Native places, bodies, and sets of relationships that sever ties between Native communities, families, and individuals.”²³ It is my conviction that a Native feminist spatial practice of this sort can have a significant impact on the discussion of violence against Native women at hand.

As I have attempted to demonstrate throughout this text, violence against Native women is intimately connected with the colonial mapping of bodies, lands, and identities. Through the construction and naturalization of the reservation, the regulation of Indian identity, the pathologization and victimization of Native women, the criminalization of Native men, and the exclusion of certain Native populations, indigenous bodies, lands, and identities have been “mapped” in exceedingly violent ways that fracture Native peoples. An acknowledgement of these occurrences, and the settler colonial logics they emerge from, is critical to positioning violence against Native women as a problem of colonialism rather than an Indian problem. This, however, is only one step in addressing the issue. As Goeman argues, we also need to remap our lives based on indigenous cultural values and contemporary needs. For example, in the contemporary moment, I would argue that we need to “open up prescribed spaces such as the reservation, itself a colonial structure,”²⁴ in order to recognize Native peoples off the rez as an integral part of our communities. This would both allow us to tackle the problem of violence against Native women on a larger scale (one that includes urban Indian women, non-recognized Indian women, and entire Native communities regardless of gender) and strengthen projects of decolonization by expanding the number of indigenous people who are able to contribute to it. Furthermore, a denouncement of the limited and disciplined way in which the space of the reservation is currently conceived could initiate an interrogation of continuing to assert an indigenous sovereignty that echoes the settler state in its reliance on borders, territory, and citizenship policies of exclusivity.

Likewise, I would argue that the contemporary moment necessitates a more expansive and inclusionary understanding of indigenous identity. As I have already argued, the current reliance on settler colonial definitions of indigeneity (such as blood quantum, racial markers, membership policies, and the process of federal recognition) alienates an immense number of Native peoples from their respective communities. A remapping of Nativeness that undoes colonial constraints could “heal the rifts and borders that maps of difference…continue to construct in the wake of colonialism.”²⁵ For example, in an essay titled “Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging,” Renya Ramirez suggests that the “Lakota philosophy encompassed in the phrase `all my relations' offers an alternative approach to tribal sovereignty that considers how people are related and embedded within social relationships with one another. Using this approach, all people are interconnected and valued and at the same time they are expected to listen and respect those around them.”²⁶ As I already signaled in my introduction, Ramirez expounds upon this idea in her book Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond where she argues that Native hubs demonstrate “a Native women's notion of urban and reservation mobility” and suggest “a political vision for social change.”²⁷ This philosophy of relationality and interconnectivity could be extremely useful for beginning to conceptualize Nativeness in ways that defy colonial restrictions and contribute to indigenous anti-violence organizing. For example, it might lessen the degree to which Native nations exclude community members on the basis of geographical location, enrollment, sexuality, etc. It might also increase Native nations' willingness to advocate for currently excluded populations of Native peoples. For example, the logic of interconnectivity might lead to the utilization of tribal funding through the VAWA or the TLOA for Native women living in urban areas. Or, it might lead to the development of future legislation that refuses to divide Native communities and privilege some over others in the first place.

In the end, however, Un-Settling Questions is less about assuming to have the solution to the problem of violence against Native women than it is about posing questions around the way the problem is currently framed. I do not presume that my seven or so years of interrogating this issue even comes close to the decades of anti-violence organizing other Native women have accomplished nor the centuries of resistance against colonialism Native communities have mounted. What I do hope, however, is that my narrative, my experience with the biopolitical and geopolitical politics of indigeneity, will help tell a fuller and more complex story of violence against Native women so that, in the future, we may continue to address this problem as part of our decolonization efforts.

Brent Harjo-Moffer, “Citizen Remarks on April 15 Photograph,” Muscogee Nation News, June 1, 2011.

Gary Fife, “Into the Clear Blue: April Marks Child Abuse Prevention Month,” Muscogee Nation News, April 15, 2011.

Harjo-Moffer.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Gary Fife, “Staff Responds to April 15 Photograph,” Muscogee Nation News, June 1, 2011.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Harjo-Moffer.

For a nuanced discussion of how reservation lands in Oklahoma have come to lose their status as reservations, please see John Moore, “The Enduring Reservations of Oklahoma” in State and Reservation: New Perspectives on Federal Indian Policy, eds. George Pierre Castile and Robert Bee (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1992), 92-109.

Jennifer Denetdale, “Carving Navajo National Boundaries: Patriotism, Tradition, and the Diné

Marriage Act of 2005,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 289-294; Mark Rifkin, “Native

Nationality and the Contemporary Queer: Tradition, Sexuality, and History in Drowning in Fire,” American Indian Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2008): 443-470; Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

Denetdale, 289.

Rifkin, 446.

Ibid.

Barker, 28.

Dian Million, “Felt Theory,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 268.

Dian Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 55.

Ibid.

As I explain in the methodology section of my introductory chapter, I utilize the concept of a prolineal genealogy as Andrea Smith describes it and identifies it in Audra Simpson's work in Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), xxii.

Mishuana Goeman, “(Re)Mapping Indigenous Presence on the Land in Native Women's Literature,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 295.

Ibid., 296.

Ibid.

Ibid., 299.

ishuana Goeman, “Notes Toward a Native Feminism's Spatial Practice,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 184.

Renya Ramirez, “Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 7, no. 2 (2007): 30.

Renya Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

American Bar Association. “Violence Against Women Act.” American Bar Association.

http://www.americanbar.org/advocacy/governmental_legislative_work/priorities_policy/a ccess_to_legal_services/vawa_home.html (accessed October 12, 2011).

Amnesty International. Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA. New York: Amnesty International USA, 2007.

-- Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA: One Year Update. New York: Amnesty International USA, 2008.

Bachman, Ronet. National Crime Victimization Survey Compilation. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2004.

Barker, Joanne. “Indian™ U.S.A.” Wicazo Sa Review 18, no.1 (2003): 24-79.

-- Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Brant, Beth, ed. A Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by North American Indian Women. Rockland: Sinister Wisdom, 1984.

Cameron, Barbara. “Gee, You Don't Seem Like an Indian From the Reservation.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 46-52. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981.

Carrillo, Jo. “Beyond the Cliffs of Abiquiu.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 65-67. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981.

Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and The Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Chrystos. “He Saw.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 18-19. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981.

-- “I Walk in the History of My People.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 57. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981.

Clark, Rose and Carrie Johnson. “Overview of Issues Facing Native Women Who Are Survivors of Violence in Urban Communities.” In Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence, edited by Sarah Deer, Bonnie Clairmont, Carrie Martell, and Maureen White Eagle, 87-99. Lanham: Altamira Press, 2008.

Coulthard, Glen. “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the `Politics of Recognition' in Canada.” Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007): 437-460.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. "Mapping at the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color." In The Public Nature of Private Violence: The Discovery of Domestic Abuse, edited by M.A. Fineman and R. Mykitiuk, 93-118. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Deer, Sarah. “Federal Indian Law and Violent Crime: Native Women and Children at the Mercy of the State.” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order 31, no.4 (2004): 17-30.

-- “Relocation Revisited: Sex Trafficking of Native Women in the United States.” William Mitchell Law Review 36 (2010): 621-683.

-- “Sovereignty of the Soul: Exploring the Intersection of Rape Law Reform and Federal Indian Law.” Suffolk University Law Review 38 (2005): 455-466.

Deer, Sarah, Bonnie Clairmont, Carrie Martell, and Maureen White Eagle, eds. Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence. New York: Altamira Press, 2008.

Deloria, Phil. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Denetdale, Jennifer. “Carving Navajo National Boundaries: Patriotism, Tradition, and the Diné Marriage Act of 2005.” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 289-294.

Domosh, Mona and Joni Seager. Putting Women In Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World. New York: The Guilford Press, 2001.

Evans-Campbell, Teresa, Taryn Lindhorst, Bu Huang, and Karina Walters, “Interpersonal Violence in the Lives of Urban American Indian and Alaska Native Women: Implications for Health, Mental Health, and Help-Seeking.” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 8 (2006): 1416-1422.

Fife, Gary. “Into the Clear Blue: April Marks Child Abuse Prevention Month,” Muscogee Nation News, April 15, 2011.

-- “Staff Responds to April 15 Photograph,” Muscogee Nation News, June 1, 2011.

Findlay, John. “An Elusive Institution: The Birth of Indian Reservations in Gold Rush

California.” In State and Reservation: New Perspectives on Federal Indian Policy, edited by George Pierre Castile and Robert Bee, 13-37. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1992.

Fixico, Donald. The Urban Indian Experience in America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

-- “Society Must Be Defended;” Lectures at the Collége de France, 1975-1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.

Goeman, Mishuana. “From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land in the Discussion of Indigenous Nation-Building.” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 23-34.