Native Space

Barnd, Natchee Blu

Published by Oregon State University Press

Barnd, Natchee Blu.

Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism.
Oregon State University Press, 2017.
Project MUSE. https://doi.org/10.1353/book56433.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/56433
 Introduction

Indigenous geographies proclaim “we are still here” in a most grounded way. In
the context of a settler colonial world, they serve as reminder of presence despite
centuries of material, philosophical, and social structures founded on produc-
ing Native absence. Indigenous continuations also illustrate that geographies are
not simply places. Choices, ways of understanding the world, and actions create
spaces that exist in particular ways. These choices, understandings, and actions,
then, must be continually practiced and reaffirmed in order for any given space
to continue to exist. Indigenous geographies have quietly overlapped and coex-
isted in tension with the geographies of the settler colonial state. They have been
submerged, but not eliminated. While they have changed to survive the vio-
lences directed at eliminating this overlap and coexistence, indigenous peoples
have sustained Native spaces.
One of the contributions this book makes is to demonstrate how Native
people are making those spaces. I am particularly interested in the everyday or
mundane ways this happens. As I elaborate below, I think of the mundane in
two ways. On the one hand, my attention to everyday spatial activities refers
to seemingly noncontroversial practices and policies in tribal communities that
nevertheless help confirm and sometimes redefine indigenous geographies. On
the other hand, I am also interested in intentionally controversial or evocative
artistic practices employed by Native artists who in their work must still rely on
and build their “insurgent messages” based on frameworks available from every-
day indigenous spatialities (Slocum 2007).
Given the distinctive space-centered epistemologies that form the bases of
indigenous relationships with the land it is not surprising that indigenous com-
munities and individuals seek to re-narrate place or reclaim indigenous geog-
raphies rather than merely capitulate to the force of national “progress” and

1
2 in t ro d u ct i on

inclusion. While attending to postcolonial spatial tension, this book centers

Native space-making practices in order to illustrate how indigenous geographies
persist within and confront the US settler colonial nation. I proceed under the
understanding that indigeneity and space are mutually bound frameworks, and
yet they are in need of attention given the urgent context of settler colonialism.
By focusing on the fundamental relationship between indigeneity and space, I
contend that we can better recognize the decolonizing possibilities and actu-
alities of indigenous geographies. We can also gain an understanding of how
indigenous geographies operate as crucial acts of self-determination and cultural
continuity. Finally, we can see how Native spaces serve as analytics for rejecting
Native dispossession and the interlocking logic of incorporation within the mul-
ticultural nation-state.

A brief outline of the book is provided at end of this introduction. For the rest of
this opening, however, I turn to some definitions and frameworks that guide this
interdisciplinary project. The following concepts pull from a vast array of the-
oretical and methodological influences, including comparative ethnic studies,
critical toponymies, indigenous geography, ethnohistory, performance theory,
language and translation theory, postcolonial theory, Whiteness studies, cul-
tural studies, cultural geography, history, American Indian studies, social his-
tory, and critical cartography. I start with the concepts indigeneity, Indianness,
and inhabiting. One of the additional goals of this book it to highlight the
spatiality of Indianness and indigeneity. By examining diverse articulations and
interconnected uses of Indianness in the construction of indigenous and settler
spatialities, Native Space addresses the relationship between race, space, indige-
neity, Whiteness, and colonialism in the contemporary United States. I use a
number of terms throughout this book whose meanings are interconnected and
therefore can benefit from elaboration. In the discussion that follows, I treat sev-
eral as clusters, including colonialism, settler colonialism, postcolonialism, and neo-
colonialism, followed by spatiality, indigenous spatialities, and settler spatialities.

Indigeneity
Indigeneity, or what might be loosely defined as the “quality of being indige-
nous,” is deeply embedded within and defined by colonial contestations over
land and geography (Radcliffe 2017,1). If settler colonialism is fundamentally
 in t ro duct io n 3

defined by its spatial organization and outcomes, then so too must be indige-
neity, a term and concept that codes as the supposed precondition of, as well
as ongoing foil to, colonial completion. Indigeneity originates in and relies on
colonial interventions and acts of racialized differentiation, yet also overlaps
with self-definitions from those whose ancestors were present on the continent
before European arrivals.
If invoking indigeneity always signals the process of contested land claims
and occupations of North American lands, then the term can only make sense
through some basic relational understandings of presence, belonging, and his-
tory. It tells us who was here first, who came later, and who should remain. It
locates fundamental cultural differences and positions them as either rooted in
practices developed in relation to this specific landscape, or else developed else-
where. It tells us how the environment came to be upon the moment of colo-
nial contact, and what happened afterward. It frames the meaning of states and
nations, who decides those meanings, and what implications follow.
Although the idea of the indigenous is dependent on and created through
colonial encounter, I also emphasize that both Native and non-Native geogra-
phies must deploy divergent frames of indigeneity. When indigenous peoples
are ignored, invisibilized, marginalized, or mythologized—all of which are stan-
dard practice in the United States—these acts reproduce fundamental frame-
works for the European colonization and ongoing US American occupation of
North American lands. At the same time, the settler colonial nation and its citi-
zens often invoke indigeneity in order to inhabit moral and geographic author-
ity, usually through a co-optation of the “Indian.” In contrast, Native peoples
invoke indigeneity to mark belonging and relationships to this land as well as to
contest colonization and the White possessive (Moreton-Robinson 2015). These
contestations over indigeneity matter because they either deny or prepare us for
after-colonial geographies, or the spaces of possibility that can emerge should we
attend to settler colonialism and critiques of White supremacy.
The promise of the extension of indigenous geographies posits an effort
toward transforming human relationships with the world in such a way as to
recover nonexploitative engagements and to restart the responsibilities of set-
tlers and arrivants toward indigenous peoples and cultures. This is clearly a
revolutionary and structurally radical imagining, and cannot be accomplished
merely by changing the faces of those in control of a racially hierarchical, capi-
talist, and colonial geography. Yet, these geographies already coexist in uneven
4 in t ro d u c t i on

fashion, whether conceived as rival, differential, or simply indigenous geogra-

phies (Castree 2004; Ferguson 1985; Goeman 2013; Ingold 2007; Said 1993;
Stark 2012).
Before we can more fully entertain these imaginative but already partially
actualized possibilities, we must more thoroughly assess how indigenous and
settler colonial geographies persist. To work toward this task, this book attends
to the practice of inhabiting as one of the powerfully mundane or “common
sense” ways spaces are enacted, justified, and sustained. I forefront inhabiting in
order to clarify the spatiality embedded within indigeneity and Indianness, and
to both highlight and distinguish between the kinds of everyday (spatial) prac-
tices that produce either settler or indigenous geographies (Billig 1995; Rifkin
2013, 2014).

Indianness and Inhabiting

Indigeneity requires some engagement with the related concept of the Indian,
a racial construct that has long facilitated the dispossession, subjugation, and
attempted incorporation of Native peoples into the United States (Barker 2005,
16–17; Byrd 2011, xxiii). I intentionally use Indianness in my analysis, in addi-
tion to indigeneity, because I want to actively frame how the processes of cre-
ating indigenous space in a settler colonial nation must simultaneously attend
to the tensions of overlapping and often opposing geographies. Indianness
encompasses a dialectical and sometimes oppositional set of understandings
about Native peoples in what is now the United States. Indianness references
indigenous self-definitions as well as definitions that are externally imposed and
sometimes mythological. It refers simultaneously to the supposedly self-evident
identity category of “Indians” as well as all the varied meanings generated within
and across diverse and complicated Native communities and histories. Certainly
the concept of an Indian has also come to serve as a useful shorthand for individ-
uals’ grounded personal or tribal experiences, for pan-tribal identifications, and
for acts of strategic essentialism (Hertzberg 1981; Spivak 1987). In these ways,
“Indianness” is used by but not fully owned by Native peoples (Berkhofer 1978).
In fact, the “Indian” is usually an abstract, even fictional conjuring: a fundamen-
tal but ultimately nominal figure in the US national trajectory. Ignoring for the
moment the relative simplicity and artificial cleanliness of this binary (Native/
non-Native), we can see that Indianness contains a tension that is continually
 in t ro duct io n 5

being negotiated and stretched into service by different constituencies (Bird

1996; Deloria 1998; Green and Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation
1975). Sometimes these meanings overlap or reinforce one another. In other con-
texts, they clash and battle. Thus, I intend the term “Indianness” to signal both
non-Native usages of the Indian toward the production of space and the Native
dis/engagements with those appropriative and imposed usages toward the same
purpose.
While I draw attention to Indianness as a fluid and multiply constituted sym-
bol, it is important to note that I do not intend to imply that Native peoples
are fully contained by this dialectic process. Contestation over these definitions
and meanings is certainly a core element of what it means to be indigenous.
Part of my intervention, however, is to consider precisely the ways that Native
individuals and communities have always expressed and generated new and self-
determined notions of identity, culture, and sovereignty that are not necessarily
just rooted in a response to the violently narrow notions of Indianness imposed
from the outside (Carpio 2004; Goeman 2013; Simpson 2014). For these rea-
sons, I am attentive to the dialectic of the Indian, although in most instances I
will deliberately privilege the more self-proscribed and self-determining prac-
tices of indigeneity and indigenous space-making that are less concerned with
directly contesting appropriations and land claims. Thus, I have gathered a
series of examples to show how indigenous geographies also emerge from rel-
atively self-contained efforts firmly rooted in and ultimately constitutive of
Native-centered worlds. I argue that indigenous geographies can never be just
a response to settler colonialism if they signal the continuation (however adap-
tive or appropriative) of precolonial epistemologies, ontologies, and practices.
To think otherwise is to assume completion of the colonial project, to freeze
history and space, and thus to encapsulate and ventriloquize indigeneity solely
via Eurocentric and state logics.
This brings us to the concept of inhabiting. At its base, inhabiting signals
the moment(s) when a body is situated in a particular physical location. It is
also a verb, implying some sort of spatially defined and relational set of actions.
Inhabiting describes a frame used for establishing belonging or home, a relation
to place. In this book, inhabiting is sometimes rooted in possession, both of land
and of Indianness. Thus, this term also refers to spatial production: to the process
of making meaning in relation to the land where bodies are situated. I apply the
term “inhabiting” to signal differing notions of relationships to land (broadly
6 in t ro d u c t i on

defined to include air, water, underground, and so on) and the related processes
of legitimization for bodily presence in specific locations (whether individual or
collective).
In terms of indigenous geographies, for example, we can turn to Tim Ingold’s
wonderful discussion of inhabiting applying only when describing humans being
fully “immersed in the fluxes of the medium [air], in the incessant movements
of wind and weather” (Ingold 2007, S34). From this perspective, humans fun-
damentally inhabit the air, not the land. Native space likewise tends to be based
on inhabitants that “make their way through a world-in-formation,” intimately
accounting for and centering the processes and relations between elements
like land, rock, water, air, clouds, smoke, wind, and weather (Ingold 2007, S32;
emphasis original). This contrasts with modern Eurocentric models that posi-
tion humans as “exhabiting” the surface of the planet, and thus being “stranded
on a closed surface” and seeing the world only through metaphors of interior or
contained spaces. Such a frame explains the desire and impetus to extend control
and shape the nonhuman world and to ignore processes and relationships except
where directly harvestable. This illustrates a core difference between indigenous
and settler geographies. This conception of inhabiting as a frame of reference
for engagement with context can also reframe settler colonial engagement with
indigeneity.
Within the settler colonial frame, inhabiting points to the European legal
construct that delineates a discrete and static moment in time that forever ren-
ders European presence legitimate. This reconciliation of belonging continually
emerges through cultural constructs that rely on layered and symbolic inhabita-
tions beyond the legal repertoires of occupation and must be performed repeat-
edly to address the “refractory imprint of the native counter-claim” (Wolfe 2006,
389). Indeed, if settler colonialism is a structure rather than event, as Patrick
Wolfe suggests, then I argue that inhabiting Indianness represents one of the
necessary modes for ongoing settling and the process of sustaining settler geog-
raphies (Wolfe 2006, 388).
As a mode of presence, justification, and relation, indigenous persistence and
indigenous geographies also require inhabiting. When Native peoples re-inhabit
Indianness (or manifest indigeneity), they signal the ongoing ways that indig-
enous peoples reject White possession of the Americas that appears so inevi-
table and yet invisible to non-Native peoples. “For indigenous people,” Aileen
Moreton-Robinson notes, “white possession is not unmarked, unnamed, or
 in t ro duct io n 7

invisible; it is hypervisible” (Moreton-Robinson 2015, xiii). Thus, in the face of

the overwhelming possessive logics of Whiteness and settler colonialism, indig-
enous peoples sustain Native geographies that unsettle and create “ontological
disturbance.” The various remappings and assertions of space practiced by indig-
enous peoples discussed in the following chapters therefore have been selected
because they either intentionally confront or analytically provide counterpoint
to what Mark Rifkin identifies as “settler common sense.” Rifkin describes settler
common sense as rooted in colonial policy and practice but emerging through
and consolidating via everyday and affective experiences that allow settlers’
“access to Indigenous territories . . . to be lived as given, as simply the unmarked,
generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history, and person-
hood” (Rifkin 2013, 323).
My use of “inhabiting” thus builds on Moreton-Robinson’s notion of a “white
possessive” that racially frames settler colonialism and on Rifkin’s attention
to the crucial and reproductive role everyday enactments (or productions) of
space play in materializing and sustaining the logics of possession and the formal
mechanisms of dispossession (Rifkin 2013, 337). Perhaps most usefully, inhab-
iting reminds us how spatial enactments can be practiced and (re)arranged in
sometimes unexpected ways toward different kinds of relations to lands, or dif-
ferent geographies.

Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Neocolonialism

At its simplest, “colonialism” stands for the “conquest and control of other peo-
ple’s lands and goods,” although we must be aware that the modes and configu-
rations of such “conquest and control” vary greatly (Loomba 2015, 20). Much of
the variation among colonialism and its derivative forms and practices centers
on difference in the modes and methods of control. In terms of the actual mech-
anisms for control, we must consider whether people/labor, goods/resources, or
land serve as the primary vehicle for conquest, although they can and usually do
overlap in meaningful ways.
As a project concerned with the production of space (which I describe below),
interrogating and comparing these various modes and methods can help us better
understand how current formations of power continue to hinge on colonial-era
land claims and conflicting geographies, and how they vary and shift. For most
of this text, I return to the two concepts that seem most appropriate: settler
8 in t ro d u ct i on

colonialism and neocolonialism. These terms (and attention to these practices)

can also help keep questions of land and space forefront. As Patrick Wolfe notes,
“territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (Wolfe 2006,
388). Land, of course, also remains core to indigenous identities, histories, and
cultures (Deloria 1994; Deloria and Wildcat 2001; Pierotti and Wildcat 2002).
Thus, I intend my use of these terms as reminders that colonizing projects ini-
tiated during European travels across the globe continue to manifest tensions
over land and space, including in some mundane ways. As these concepts remain
an ever-present context, much of this book therefore considers the various ways
that indigenous peoples call attention to and resist the ongoing nature of colo-
nial space-making, as well as the ways they continue to maintain and produce
their own geographies against or despite colonialism.
Colonialism, in its “purest” form, has traditionally been understood as an
unequal power relationship wherein a dominating population extracts labor
and/or resources from a subordinated population of an “external” location. “A
colonial system of relationships,” Lorenzo Veracini points out, “is premised on
the presence and subjugation of exploitable ‘Others’” (Veracini 2014, 615). This
basic frame also highlights the embedded role of geography as a central defining
factor of all colonial endeavors. In short, colonialism fundamentally describes a
geographic relationship, one in which “differing” geographies serve as a mech-
anism for producing and maintaining unequal power relations with a “home”
geography.
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sugar plantations established by
Europeans in the Caribbean represent one concrete example of colonialism: in
this case, plantation colonialism. The history of these plantations illuminates
a unique element in European colonialism. European colonialism developed
mutually with concepts of race and the corresponding practices of racism,
as well as with capitalism (Blaut 1993; Césaire 1972; Goldberg 1993). In the
Caribbean, lands had already been largely widowed of indigenous peoples, and
thus plantation labor was extracted by enslaving and importing Africans. These
ventures figured into a global economic expansion, as European nations vied
against one another for economic and political superiority through exploitation
of lands and laboring bodies. As part of European global exploration, develop-
ing notions of race both shaped and were shaped by the slave trade and the colo-
nial encounter with non-Europeans. Through the frame of a newly emerging
racial logic targeting non-Europeans, the European “idea of the colonial world
 in t ro duct io n 9

became one of a people intrinsically inferior, not just outside history and civ-
ilization, but genetically pre-determined to inferiority. Their subjections was
not just a matter of profit and convenience but also could be constructed as a
natural state” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1998, 47).
The scale of European colonialism, starting in the sixteenth century, extended
beyond that of previous examples of colonies and conquests. Increased mobil-
ity and the codevelopment of European colonialism with capitalism greatly
increased the geographic reach of such projects and fortified each through
expanding and increasingly interdependent economic networks. As Ania
Loomba suggests, “colonialism was the midwife that assisted at the birth of
European capitalism, . . . without colonial expansion the transition to capitalism
could not have taken place in Europe” (Loomba 2015, 22).
Settler colonialism describes a form of colonialism wherein nonindigenous or
“settler” populations implant themselves in new lands. Lorenzo Veracini describes
the difference as being between shaping and controlling a landscape versus chang-
ing and claiming the landscape. “In the case of colonialism what is reproduced is
an (unequal) relationship, while in the case of settler colonialism, what is repro-
duced is a biopolitical entity” (Veracini 2014, 627; emphasis original). Patrick
Wolfe summarizes the same process by offering this succinct assessment: “Settler
colonialism destroys to replace” (Wolfe 2006, 388). Settlers initiate a fundamen-
tal transformation in the demographics, cultures, and physical landscape of colo-
nized lands. Settler presence is the core feature of this mode of domination, with
the goal of establishing a new home to solidify territorial claims.
As an extension of the home country, then, settler colony lands are redesigned
toward the home country’s imposed goals, as well as toward reflecting settler
identity. As Said notes, “Colonial space must be transformed sufficiently so as
no longer to appear foreign to the imperial eye” (Said 1993, 226). This trans-
formation can, of course, take numerous forms. For the purpose of this book, I
focus tightly on the model characterizing British North American settler colo-
nialism, in which indigenous peoples were not broadly incorporated into the
settler societies, and in which they usually resisted such efforts when pursued.
Disease often devastated indigenous populations, yet settlers also actively used
warfare as well as political, “legal,” and other-than-legal means to actively dispos-
sess them of lands.
This articulation, of course, constructs a simplified binary between those who
settle and those who are already present, and streamlines the complex and uneven
10 in t ro d u ct i on

process by which these outcomes unfold. In terms of the settlers, for example,
Jodi Byrd notes that settler colonialism recruits people from both the colonizing
nation and beyond in the form of servants, laborers, slaves, immigrants, and ref-
ugees (Byrd 2011). She thereby differentiates between settlers and what she calls
“arrivants,” those largely non-White, nonindigenous peoples that likewise arrive
and occupy the land even as they do not arrive under the same circumstances or
positionalities. Most important for this book, however, is to recall that the cate-
gories of indigenous, settler, and arrivant peoples always rest on the relationship
between physical presence on a specific land and belonging, on relationships to
home and belonging. Those categories point to ongoing and conflicting practices
of space-making (inhabiting) resulting from colonial processes and the complex
modes of presence and proscribed inclusion.
In this context we must note how the dominant settler colonial geographies
continually work to submerge indigenous ones. As Ania Loomba explains, for
settler colonialism to exist, “the process of ‘forming a community’ in the new
land necessarily meant un-forming or re-forming the communities that existed
there already, and involved a wide range of practices including trade, settlement,
plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, and enslavement” (Loomba 2015, 20).
Likewise Paige Raibmon and Cole Harris have outlined the various structured/
official and everyday/unofficial means by which settler colonial societies have to
make and “unmake” indigenous space precisely because Native peoples work to
recover, maintain, or reinscribe their geographies (Harris 2002; Raibmon 2008).
I also want to emphasize that the relationship between colonialism and set-
tler colonialism often proves more complementary and less binary. Veracini, for
example, points out how, historically, colonialism and settler colonialism might
best be seen as a “division of colonial labour” (Veracini 2014, 627), whereby
these two different models of conquest flexibly operate at various scales, and his-
torically can be found to cooperate in extending, protecting, or securing mecha-
nisms and structures of domination. Recognizing this relationship is important
for making sense overall of the processes and fluidities of domination as well
as the varied forms of resistance required to address the ongoing consequences
of mutable colonialisms. This recognition is reflected in the terms “neocolo-
nialism” and “postcolonial,” which I outline below. Those terms emerge from
understanding how colonialism is continually reshaped and resisted. They serve
as reminder that any effective contestation must also evolve.
 in t ro duct io n 11

Veracini argues that finding appropriate analogies for colonialism and settler
colonialism can tell us a great deal about how we might contest such forms of
domination. In his “heuristic” analysis, he creatively analogizes colonialism and
settler colonialism with virus and bacteria, respectively. The virus operates in
largely parasitic fashion, sustaining itself through the lifeblood of the host and
mutating to best ensure its survival and success through various hosts and host
defenses. Historically, human colonies likewise extract resources and compel col-
onized labor for sustenance, while maintaining their relatively distinct coherence
as entities. Bacteria, in contrast, “attach to surfaces and form aggregations” that
reproduce without direct exploitation of a host, and in the process of aggregation
take on new forms as entities (Veracini 2014, 615). Bacterial colonies effectively
absorb, assimilate, and transform their environment such that they “make and
remake places and are also simultaneously transformed by them” (Veracini 2014,
624). In short, such colonies adapt to a new environment, rapidly reproduce and
expand, and finally stabilize as a new and unique entity. A settler colony parallels
bacteria in that its vitality relies on the mutual transformations of the colonizing
“body” and the space of colonization, even as the indigenous population may
not strategically figure into those transformational processes.
Reminding us that these processes can operate in concert, Veracini helps
point out historical conditions in which “some areas could only become sub-
jected to colonizing metropoles after colonial ‘viruses’ had evolved in ways that
would allow it to penetrate as well as to attach to new areas” (Veracini 2014, 619;
emphasis original). Thus, a settler colony sometimes requires the groundwork of
a preceding colony. Here we should note that, despite the differing and some-
times cooperating methods for exogenous prosperity, both methods share and
are premised on spatial domination (what Veracini calls “destination locales”). In
settler colonialism, however, land rather than people proves the most immediate
mechanism for domination and the core point of contention for both colonizer
and colonized.
I draw on these analogies because they are useful not only in thinking about
contestation of colonial structures and outcomes, but also in extending our
understanding of the relationships of colonialism and settler colonialism to
that of postcolonialism and neocolonialism. As Blunt and McEwan explain,
“the ‘post’ of ‘postcolonialism’ has two meanings, referring to a temporal after-
math—a period of time after colonialism—and a critical aftermath—cultures,
12 in t ro d u c t i on

discourses and critiques that lie beyond, but remain closely influenced by, colo-
nialism” (Blunt and McEwan 2002, 3; emphasis original). The notion of post-
colonialism as an analytical tool and as an account of the “critical aftermath”
of colonialism is therefore closely tied to a recognition of the emergence of
neocolonialism, which encompasses global economic domination regardless of
historic colonial relations and carves out new forms of domination operating
entirely through the forces of globalization.
This project uses the concept of postcolonialism to focus on those critical
intellectual and material interventions against colonial and ongoing neocolonial
practices still in need of confrontation. I am interested in those indigenous-
centered postcolonialisms that seek to disrupt the ongoing experiences of settler
colonialism and neocolonialism. Neocolonialism, which directly translates to a
“new” form of colonialism, sustains persistent structures of “cultural, economic,
and political inequalities” and perpetuates the “endurance of colonial discourses”
that originate with colonization and yet “persist long after the end of formal
political colonization” (Nash 2002, 220). Ashcroft and colleagues point out that
Kwame Nkrumah (who first coined this term in his book Neo-Colonialism: The
Last Stage of Imperialism) identified the ways neocolonialism was actually “more
insidious and more difficult to detect and resist than the older overt colonialism”
(Ashcroft et al. 1998,163; Nkrumah 1966). This articulation of what Veracini
labels a “mutated” and more evasive “strain” of colonial domination points to
the ways that neocolonialism operates through hegemony rather than through
direct force, and thus the mechanisms of domination and the resulting spatial
configurations are more easily naturalized and less easily confronted (Gramsci
1971; Veracini 2014).
Often still overlooked is the way that settler colonialism continues, and that it
heavily overlaps with neocolonialism. This overlap points directly to the role of
geography. English (and now multicultural) settler societies currently present a
confluence of direct intervention and indirect neocolonial structures in relation
to indigenous peoples. When the United States is positioned as a postcolonial
nation or is denied as an example of domination in relation to indigenous peo-
ples, it furthers the entrenchment still reliant on a land base predicated on con-
tinual indigenous dispossession.
 in t ro duct io n 13

Spatiality, Indigenous Spatialities, and Settler Spatialities

When I use the terms “spatiality” and “spatialities,” I am actively marking and
recalling the fact that space is a production, and is always multiple. In The
Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre provides the core theoretical reframing of
space as something other than a simple blank stage upon which social actors
gather and interact (Lefebvre 1991). He explains that space is a product of our
social imaginings and actions, which coalesce into coherence as well as material
form. Spatial productions express and secure dominance most effectively when
seen as merely existing—as supposed natural expressions of the world-as-it-is. In
this way, spatiality signals the individual and collective processes we engage in to
produce space and the ways that we are also produced by spaces.
One of the important benefits of a conception of space as produced and
contingent is that geography can then be more fully understood in relation to
power. Any dominant form of space or spatiality stands as, and is, power, as it
structures particular values about, views of, and practices within the world and
reinforces these structures by shaping encounters to match that world. Thus,
an analysis of space must fundamentally hold the exercise of power as one of
its principal features. As John Allen argues, “power is inherently spatial and,
conversely, spatiality is imbued with power” (Allen 2003, 3; emphasis original).
In the context of settler colonialism and neocolonialism, we can readily see how
space is imbued with power since it is not only hegemonic in conveying a sense
of the geography of the nation-state as being just “common sense,” but it has
also been actively utilized in dispossession and disempowerment toward the
benefit of one group of peoples over another. In the aftermath of the various
forms of colonialism, the dominant contemporary geographies still represent a
successful consolidation and extension of the forms of spatial production initi-
ated centuries ago.
While current understandings of space already imply a “relational” or pro-
cessual practice, combining spatiality with a modifier—indigenous, settler—fur-
ther signals two specific kinds of space and space-making operating in tension
with one another (Massey 2005). The additions of the qualifiers “settler” and
“indigenous” then leads to the task of clarifying or qualifying what defines these
different kinds of spatiality. I am drawing on the categories of indigenous and
settler spatialities to note two shapes of engagement centered on the relation-
ship to the lands of North America and the frames for making sense of those
14 in t ro d u ct i on

relationships. Most importantly, these different spatialities are rooted in the his-
toric and racialized experiences of peoples who experienced colonialism as either
colonized or colonizer. In this sense, these categories of spatiality can be viewed
in relation to one another, intimately formed by the experience of encounter and
subsequent reconfigurations of land, culture, and agency. At the onset of colo-
nialism, the Doctrine of Discovery predicated conferral of dominion on both
the inability and the unwillingness of Europeans to recognize or respect indige-
nous spatialities (treaty or not). Thus, we find concepts like terra nullius and the
“virgin landscape,” both of which relied on a Western spatiality rooted in inten-
tional, observable, and demarcated human interventions in the processes of the
natural world. This world was thus quickly overlaid with abstract space to render
it recognizable, manageable, and alienable. While indigenous peoples obviously
modified the land, such labor and engagement was not always signposted, and
their modifications worked effectively enough within the existing ecosystems as
to often remain invisible to Western eyes (Anderson 2013; Cajete 2000; Cronon
1983; Kimmerer 2013). Settlers simply interpreted indigeneity as either lacking
proper spatiality or without sufficient authority and moral capacity. The result
was conscription of the land into settler spatial systems that erased “other ways
to relate geography and identity” (Radcliffe 2011, 140).
Such conflicts continue. These frames remain the central differences between
indigenous and nonindigenous peoples, and they continue to coexist in uneasy
tension with one another in the same place and time. “Spatial co-habitation by
Indigenous and settler populations” Brad Coombes and colleagues note, “entails
confrontation of divergent notions of place construction, along with other dis-
orderly ontological categories which underpin epistemological and teleological
classifications” (Coombes et al. 2011, 486).

Organization of the book

Before briefly summarizing the chapters that follow, I want to note a cou-
ple of methodological approaches and highlight the relationship between the
first three chapters and the final two. Each chapter begins with a narrative that
shares some of my own experiences with specific spatial productions and how
they exemplify spatial practices. The narratives themselves represent important
methodological practices in a couple of ways. I am consciously emphasizing the
power and function of the mundane, or what Michael Billig calls the “banal,”
 in t ro duct io n 15

everyday acts that prove crucial for dominant spatial productions (Billig 1995).
Billig’s study of everyday acts that sustain nationalism explains how seemingly
meaningless and nonspectacular activities actually represent core sets of artifacts
and regular repertoires through which nationalism is understood and on which
it is dependent. These small acts effectively set the stage on which “larger” and
more explicit enactments of nationalism can take place and make sense. Victoria
Freeman similarly observes such acts in the erasures of indigenous Toronto.
Following Alan Gordon, she reminds us that formal public memory events and
collective performances of ideologies must be successfully crafted in advance “to
have any symbolic or emotive power” during obvious and ceremonial perfor-
mances of identity and ideology (Freeman 2010, 30; Gordon 2001, 165).
These small, usually mundane, acts are therefore crucial as the ongoing labor
required for any spatial production. Such practices are not limited to hegemonic
productions. Although indigenous geographies, for example, must be fluent in
the dominant spatial regimes and practices as a matter of survival (and result
from assimilation violences), they can be sustained and produced only through
normalizing practices. Native space must be constantly recognized and made via-
ble through daily practices. In this way, my approach further illustrates the every-
day spatial work being done through what Mark Rifkin has nicely delineated
as “settler common sense,” as well as frames the impact of practicing embodied
rather than just legal or political forms of indigenous sovereignty (Bruyneel
2007; Coulthard 2014; Lyons 2010; Rifkin 2014; Warrior 1995). My movement
across the chapters is therefore intended as a loose progression from the more
concrete forms of space-making toward the more conceptual and artistic, which
is also a movement from less to more explicit and self-conscious spatial counter-
productions. Viewing the chapters together, the specific examples reveal the vital
(and vitalizing) conceptual frameworks embedded within all the various forms
of indigenous spatial practices and related geographies.
In light of these relationships, chapter 1 discusses several reservation commu-
nities where tribal peoples use indigeneity in the material construction of spatial
markers. Crafted to parallel the second chapter, which explores White spaces
and Indian Villages, this set of research sites demonstrate that Native commu-
nities have an equivalent interest in the construction of Indianness via spatial
markers, but those markers manifest dissimilar outcomes to White communi-
ties. These communities use a variety of strategies in marking tribal space using
indigeneity, reflecting the diverse and nuanced senses of identity and history
16 in t ro d u ct i on

that have shaped each community, even as they respond to similar frames of col-
onization and racialization.
The second chapter picks up where this introduction leaves off discussing
Indian Villages. It documents and analyzes the use of Indianness for crafting
White space. Using cartographic and demographic data, I document the twenti-
eth-century proliferation of Indian-themed street names across residential areas
in cities, suburbs, and rural towns of every region in the country. We find that
while non-White racialized and nonheterosexual space is always constructed as
a kind of borderlands delineating the outer boundaries of a “central” normative
White space, the spaces that reference Native people dramatically break from
this practice and are commonly used where they can directly designate norma-
tive White spaces. In contrast to tribal communities and their diverse use of indi-
geneity, these communities draw from a simplified template without significant
variation (“Indian”) that operates within the logic of colonialism and multicul-
tural incorporation. These efforts ultimately render Native peoples absent and
invisible, and represent a characteristically mundane and concrete example of
neocolonial spatial projects.
Chapter 3 turns to two geographically distant sites where the processes of
identity and spatial production overlap with one another through a shared reli-
ance on notions of Indianness and, specifically, through a relationship to the
historic, real-life Kiowa warrior Set-tainte. The first story centers on the Satanta
Day ceremony and the town of Satanta, in rural southwestern Kansas, where a
ceremony annually commemorates the town name (derived from Set-tainte) and
bestows titles of “chief ” and “princess” on successive generations of its residents.
The second story considers the Set-tainte descendants’ powwow in Oklahoma
and broader Kiowa efforts to remember and sanction Set-tainte’s anticolonial
vision for Kiowa identity and space, as well as continue their traditional mainte-
nance of the Set-tainte name. The comparison and juxtaposition of these stories
serves to illustrate the ways Indianness and indigeneity are used in conflicting
ways for the production of space, but also explores the possibilities of reconcilia-
tion and reconstruction of alternative geographies.
Chapters 4 and 5 engage with Native artists as a way of expanding the scope of
Native interrogations with space and its relationship to Indianness and indigene-
ity. I focus on several artists who have utilized their creative productions to speak
to issues of indigenous geography or the constant struggle between the making
and unmaking of Native space. I suggest that these works, split between artists
 in t ro duct io n 17

that work with the medium of maps (chapter 4) and those that employ public
installations (chapter 5), operate through a shared Native relationship to space
and colonialism that must privilege the concepts of land and space. I explore
how these two mediums offer complementary but also differing modes of cen-
tering dispossession, presence, and mobility for Native peoples and communities
in a neocolonial nation.