Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
2nd Interdisciplinary Conference Ecological - Ethical Encounters: The Question of Justice for the Earth (2. Disiplinlerarası Ekolojik-Etik Temaslar: Yeryüzü İçin Adalet Sorusu), İstanbul, Türkiye, 01 Mayıs 2018, cilt.3, ss.25-44
“Surrounded Land, Unsurrendered People: Native American Peoples and Land Rights from the Past to Present”
In elaborating on the connection between the land and the people, Paula Gunn Allen posits; “[w]e are the land”, drawing our attention to an existent epistemological unity; since “… the land (Mother) and the people (mothers) [are] the same”. Thus any separation between the land and the people is detrimental to the wholeness and balance required for the self-construction of the Indian American peoples. The contemporary Native American artist Joseph M. Sanchez in his turn, iterating the purpose of the 2007 Bienal “Relations - Indigenous Dialogue”, defines the relationship of the Native American artists to the natural world “… as custodians of her well-being”. According to Sanchez, the connection to nature is the true heritage of the indigenous populations, and since the planet is a “relation”, an ancestor of the Native Americans, the planet ought to be treated with respect and the ongoing responsibility for the planet remains the foremost duty of the artist.
In terms of textuality, it can be argued that the attempt at establishing unision between the self and the community/ land lies at the very crux of American Indian literary practices, since the individual self needs to become whole while bridging any existing gaps between the self and the family/ tribe/ clan and the land. In short the subjectivity created in textuality is a communal selfhood, which is firmly located within the sites of the history of the Native American peoples and the land with which ties need to be re-forged if necessary. Thus, while Pam Colorado’s poem What Every Indian Knows depicts the historical “Trail of Tears” as one more exercise in genocide, drawing the various parallels between nazism and imperialism through her intertextual usage of Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, her poem is a warning against internalised colonisation. D’Arcy Mc Nickle on the other hand, writing before the 1960s Native American Renaissance, is presenting a rather dark picture of the plight of the Salish in his novel The Surrounded. The fate of the Salish is bound up with that of the land, and another historical event, the Dawes Act had partitioned the land and caused a rift amongst the peoples. Further, they are feeling surrounded as the land is severed by the wired fences, and the onset of the white man’s law hunts them even in the surrounding mountains which can no longer give refuge but simply has come to contain them.
This article, in drawing on Pam Colorado’s poem What Every Indian Knows, and D’Arcy Mc Nickle’s The Surrounded dwells on how through forced exiles and the partitioning of the land, the Native American peoples have had to fight against a dispersal of their collective identities while they were stripped of their connection to the land, which is the touchstone of their identity configuration. Yet, the peoples have not surrendered. Moving on to the present, the recovery of the communal identity is apparent in the claiming of land rights in the aftermath of the uranium mining and the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline. Thus, the Native American peoples are today standing as the custodians of the earth and protecting their land from the further ravages of environmental racism, as the Standing Rock Sioux resistance of 2016 illustrates.
Key words: Alienation, internalised colonisation, Native American, American Indian, land, earth, Indigenous peoples, colonisation, Dakota Access Oil Pipeline, environmental racism.