The Joy of Resistance

“Joy” appears in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body at least 19 times.

This is a word not commonly associated with First Nations/American Indian literature, but I wish it were. Belcourt insists it is part of the Native experience, that it must be.

Belcourt is a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation, and he does not deny the pain and grief that comes with living as a queer Indigenous person in a settler colonial state. Nor does he deny the anger and resentment. He discusses these topics in his collection of essays.

But joy is key to overcoming those things, and pleasure in its various expressions (physical, emotional, intellectual) is an important element of Native life. It always has been. It is part of a Native person’s inheritance from their ancestors, and it must continue to guarantee a Native future.

I did not count them, but the words “future,” “futurity,” and “utopia” also appear frequently in the book. They are made possible (or at least desirable) by joy.

Belcourt writes that with joy Native people can “breach the haze of suffering” inflicted on them by the Canadian government and the Canadian dominant culture. He states joy is an “ethics of resistance” (8).

I encountered the word so often as I read his new book that I wanted a new word: jouissistance.

This would be a combination of the jouissance and resistance.

Why combine those words? Because the new word echoes “survivance,” which is a very popular word in American Indian Literary Studies. That word was introduced into American Indian Studies by Anishinaabe theorist and writer Gerald Vizenor, and it commonly is understood as a combination of the words “survival” and “resistance.” The settler colonial cultures of the United States and Canada want Native people to disappear, and they expend great efforts to make that happen. So any act of survival is an act of resistance for Native people.

However, I believe Vizenor means more than that with the word. Survivance is originally a French word that is similar to the concept of inheritance, “the right of such succession in case of survival” (19). In a chapter titled “Aesthetics of Survivance,” Vizenor describes examples of Native people claiming their cultural inheritances, evoking the presence of ancestors through their actions (telling old stories, speaking their language, etc.) and claiming their personal and Native sovereignty from colonizers. A Native person’s act of survivance is not merely personal; by surviving they keep more than themselves alive; their survival is a continuance of their ancestors and their community.

For Belcourt, feeling joy can be, it seems, an act of survivance. Joy – and with it love, hope, and optimism -- is an inheritance, a birthright. He states this clearly in his preface, when he thanks his grandmother, his nôhkom, who taught him to be “a practitioner of the utopian.” He writes, “This book, then, is as much an ode to you as it is to the world-to-come” (3). Thanks to her gifts he can write himself “into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race,” which he says stalks her and her family. He hopes she can see in his book his affection for her: “That affection is joy, and it started with you. Now, I see it everywhere” (6).

As for jouissance – this is a word already in use by theorists in several fields, but I am borrowing it from French feminist writer Hélène Cixous. She used the word to describe, among other things, female sexual and emotional pleasure, and it can be understood as pleasure that is excessive and ungovernable – and therefore transgressive in a male-dominated society that seeks to confine and control women and their sexuality. Cixous writes about this in “Sorties,” which originally appeared in 1975 in French. Its English translation can be found in The Newly Born Woman (1986), and the glossary of that book defines jouissance as “sexual ecstasy.” The glossary states, “At the simplest level of meaning – metaphorical – woman’s capacity for multiple orgasm indicates that she has the potential to attain something more than Total, something extra… Real and unrepresentable.” The glossary also states that the word can have “sexual, political, and economic overtones. Total access, total participation, as well as total ecstasy are implied” (165).

I find this concept of pleasure useful for discussing Belcourt’s book. Native pleasure subverts the settler colonial state that tries to make Native existence miserable and therefore untenable. The settler states of Canada and the United States attack Native bodies (quickly with violence and slowly with degraded living conditions), so celebrating and enlivening Native bodies with sexual pleasure resists that erasure. Native jouissance resists the power of the state to observe and control Native bodies. Quite literally, some Native orgasms resist that erasure by producing more Native bodies.

The queer Native body is targeted for erasure in multiple ways. The dominant culture targets the queer Native body for being brown and for being queer; so the pleasure of the queer Native body is overcoming a double-negation. This negation can also come from within a Native community that has adopted the dominant culture’s prejudices against queerness (and other expressions of sexuality). We could say some queer Native people must overcome yet another negation, a self-negation, since they may resent their body for its queerness. Therefore, queer Native jouissance can be easily understood as subversive or transgressive. This joy makes life more desirable, makes imagining a bright future more possible. Jouissistance is necessary for the futurity that Belcourt writes to create.

With A History of My Brief Body, Belcourt seeks to “keep brown queer joy in the world… a world-to-come imbued with brown queer possibility” (126-127).

Yes.

+ + +

Understanding Native sexuality as resistance is not new. Back in 2000, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm wrote, “Indigenous erotica is political” (98). She was describing the anthology project she would eventually publish as Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica (2003). She wrote about the repression of Native sexuality: “We were supposed to vanish, to die, not procreate, for God's sake!” (99). Although I may be coining a new word, jouissistance, I am not claiming to have a new idea. I simply find it particularly useful for thinking about a book I recently read and enjoyed.

I imagine this response to A History of My Brief Body will continue to evolve, and I may develop it further and expand this short essay.

As for jouissistance, I can find just one reference to it online. It is used once in a French legal reference book from 1879.

 

Works Cited

Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri. “Without Reservation: Erotica, Indigenous Style.” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 35, no. 3 (Fall 2000), pp. 97-104.

---. Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica. Kegedonce Press, 2003.

Belcourt, Billy-Ray. A History of My Brief Body. Two Dollar Radio, 2020.

Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 24. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Vizenor, Gerald. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

America: Come for the Civil Disobedience, Stay for the Thunderdome

During the early days of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, when police departments were freaking out and the White House was clearing a churchyard with smoke grenades and batons, I was reading a book about American Indian law, and I was struck by some unfortunate similarities between what I read on the page and what I saw on the screen.

On Twitter I shared this image with the caption, "America: Come for the Civil Disobedience, Stay for the Thunderdome." In retrospect, though, the image is perhaps more like a scene from the Roman Coliseum than a Mad Max movie. Demonstrators were more like Christians being thrown to the lions than they were like Mel Gibson fighting Tina Turner's goons.

Mad Max: Police Academy?

At the same time, I was reading about a Supreme Court case, United States v Sandoval (1913), in Walter Echo-Hawk's book titled In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided. With that case, and several that Echo-Hawk relates to it, the U.S. government claimed broad guardianship authority over American Indians, authority it did not claim over other Americans. He wrote:

Big Brother can and did "do things" to Indians as their "guardian" that it could never do to regular citizens (202).

That guardian authority included the imposition of some religious beliefs and the denial of others (Native religious practices were explicitly outlawed well into the 20th century); control of property and financial transactions; and unilateral law enforcement and judicial processes.

This guardianship was based on the false assumption that American Indians were inherently inferior to white Americans and needed their guidance, as if they were children. It was also based on the assumption that the guardians were free of any repercussions for harming their wards. (Echo-Hawk demonstrates how this guardianship authority was repeatedly used to abuse rather than protect American Indians.)

I thought of this as I saw police officers swinging batons like baseball bats against unarmed, non-violent demonstrators in downtown Los Angeles. And when I saw a police officer using his shield as if he were Captain America and a photojournalist were Thanos. I thought of it when I saw an armored personnel carrier rolling through a Philadelphia neighborhood.

@ryanvizzions

The militarized police response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were very familiar to Indian

Country. In 2016, we all saw the response to water protectors trying to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on unceded land belonging to the Great Sioux Nation. South Dakota brought armored cavalry to confront unarmed civilians. The water protectors were attacked by dogs, doused with pepper spray, and blasted with a water cannon on a freezing night. 

I do not know how much of the nation was outraged by the events at Standing Rock. President Obama delayed the construction of the pipeline, but he did not intervene in the violence, saying he would "let it play out for several more weeks," as if the opposing forces were equal in strength and legal justifications.

I think it was easy for many Americans to watch the events and remain unmoved. The events were happening on a fairly isolated reservation, so there were no traffic jams nor curfews to inconvenience people not directly involved. Many viewers may have been undisturbed also because this was a confrontation they were accustomed to: the Cavalry vs. the Indians. Even if their sympathies were with the Native people, they were accustomed, through national mythology, to understand Indians as potential enemies. That is the slippery slope in the guardian relationship between the federal government and Native communities: some times there was little difference between being a ward and being a prisoner of war.

But the violence at the Black Lives Matter demonstrations took place in the center of the nation's largest cities, not on the faraway Great Plains. I thought of this notion of abusive guardianship when I read about curfews that were declared 10 minutes before they were enforced, and when I read about groups of demonstrators who were not allowed to leave public spaces and who were then arrested for violating the curfew. Demonstrators were shot directly with rubber bullets (not how they were intended to be used) and hit with gas canisters. Limbs were broken. Eyes were damaged.

I asked at what point did the police gain such authority over U.S. citizens? When were they given the authority to injure people who were not violating a law and who were not threatening other people? Citizens are not given the authority to protect themselves against this violence. Would the police wield pepper spray with such nonchalance if they knew there was a good chance someone would spray them back? When were they given authority to swing their batons at people's legs simply for "crowd control"?

When did we surrender the right of self-protection?

How were people so easily transformed from citizens to enemies?

A legal scholar can probably tell me when this state of affairs evolved, and I assume it is involved with the concept of "qualified immunity," so perhaps my question is more "why?" or "how?" What is the legal reasoning behind the government declaring that demonstrators have surrendered their right to assemble, their freedom of speech, their freedom of movement, and their right to protect themselves?

And why should we let this continue?

To me, the assumption being made is similar to that articulated in Sandoval. People voicing their displeasure with the government are being considered (without legal or formal declaration) inferior to other citizens and surrender, like minors or children, many rights to their self-declared guardians.

Viewed in the light of an abusive guardian relationship -- the assumption of inferiority and the removal of Constitutional rights -- I think most Americans would agree that it is time to reconsider the authority that federal and state governments claim over their citizens.

+ + +

American Indian Studies has important lessons for all U.S. citizens because it considers some fundamental questions of interest to everyone. In this case, what does it mean to be a citizen? What is the right relationship between a person and their government? What responsibilities does the citizen have to their government and their government to them?

It is useful for them to study cases in which the government has for so long denied its obligations and disregarded the rights of individuals. It is useful for them to see how arbitrarily and self-servingly the federal government has conducted its relationship with Native nations, and for them to consider the possibility that their government could do the same with them.

A big reason people in Indian Country were so happy with this week's decision in McGirt v Oklahoma was that the Supreme Court simply followed the rules. It offered simple, clear interpretations of the law and honored a treaty the U.S. government had signed. Indian Country expected the usual contortions of legal and moral reasoning from the Supreme Court to justify the continued dispossession and abuse of Native people. When that did not happen, Native people were elated. The court decision was good news, but its reception is sad, really. It is a commentary on how rare "doing the right thing" can be.

America's Motto: Do Not Tell Me What To Do

When I teach courses on American Literature, I talk with my students about fundamental beliefs or behaviors that we might find in the texts for the class. We search for important values -- positive and negative -- that shaped the history and cultures of the United States. 

Frequently, I tell them a story about the American South. In the late 1600s, investors from England were given charters to colonize Carolina. They recruited people to travel there and develop specific allotments of land. Everything had been mapped out before their arrival, and they were intended to live and work in their assigned locations. But once they arrived, the settlers located themselves wherever they pleased, regardless of the promises they had made beforehand. Describing this in his book Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, Gary Nash writes, "In government, as in land affairs, they did what they pleased."

This is perhaps the most fundamental American value: Do not tell me what to do.

I need my Hot Pockets!

It definitely seems more true than the phrases found on our currency. More true than the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one). More predictive of American behavior than In God We Trust.

Stop calling me Karen!

This American value of irrational individualism is evident each day with more videos of Olds and Karens refusing to wear their masks in public, despite the Coronavirus pandemic. Whether it is an older man trying to push his way into WalMart without a mask or a white woman incensed that she cannot shop bare-faced at Trader Joe's, we see a pattern of refusing to obey the rules.

Could wearing a mask help save their life?

It does not matter. Do not tell them what to do.

Could it save the life of another person?

That matters even less. They are not responsible for anyone but themselves. Oh, and do not tell them what to do.

I believe most people are sensible and considerate of others. I think most Americans who are not the President or Vice President of the United States wear masks. But we should not be surprised by the refusal to surrender one's minor freedoms for the good of others. This stubborness was present at the very beginning of the United States, and it may be responsible for hastening its end.

"Do unto others"? What does that mean?

P.S. -- I think we could easily say the attitude discussed here can be racially marked/defined; it is a white American value. Those people coming to Carolina and refusing to live where they had agreed to live? They were white, and some of them had slaves, especially those who were coming from Caribbean. The United States was founded by and for white people who resented being told what to do by an authority figure, but they seemed little bothered by telling other people what to do -- Africans and Natives, especially. A Karen, by definition is a white woman. And the olds I have seen vocally resisting the masks have been mostly white folks. The Coronavirus pandemic has coincided with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and I wonder to what degree the hysteria against masks is driven by white people feeling threatened by demands for equality and justice. As the saying goes, "When you're privileged, equality feels like oppression."

Amerika: What does it mean?

I saw this image recently and immediately thought, "Welcome to Amerika."

Then I quickly asked myself, "Why did Amerika flash through my mind rather than America? Why was that word so readily available to my brain's information-retrieval system? Why did that make instant sense?"

The photograph was taken by ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz, and she posted it on her Twitter account. It was taken during protest demonstrations in Washington, D.C. on June 2. These are U.S. soldiers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In front of them, and not seen in this image, are protesters demonstrating against police brutality and in support of Black Lives Matter.

Why did the image instantly evoke AMERIKA in my mind?

My first encounter with that spelling was on a poster I had in my bedroom is a kid. Thanks to the Internet, where it seems you can find EVERYTHING, I was able to find an image of that poster.

This poster apparently was created after a Bank of America branch was burned near the University of California Santa Cruz campus in 1970. (You can buy the poster at justseeds.org.) I was 9 years old in 1970. I doubt I bought it that year. But even if I got it several years later, when I had become a teenager, did I understand what AMERIKA meant then?

So after seeing Raddatz's photograph and recalling my burning-bank poster, I looked up the word for some clues about its meaning and history. This is a variant spelling of America for German and Russian sources. (Oddly enough, Adolph Hitler's personal train, a mobile fortress HQ, was called Amerika.) So even though those German and Soviet sources had been describing an enemy when they used the word "Amerika," in the late 1960s the word began to associate the United States with those repressive and fascist governments. For instance, Carl Wittman published "Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto" in 1970, describing how San Francisco had become a center for people escaping homophobia. "Amerika" associates the United States with the repressive and militaristic regimes that traditionally have been considered its opponents. Rather than suggesting America as promoting freedom, Amerika suggests opposing freedom.

Jump ahead to 1987, and we find Amerika is the title of an ABC series starring Kris Kristofferson  about the Soviet Union taking over the United States.The TV series is discussed briefly by K.E. Roberts and Michael Grasso in "Avenge Me!: American Catharsis in 1980s Soviet Invasion Fantasies" While works like Amerika and Red Dawn (1984) depicted paranoid fantasies about alien invasions, Grasso indicates the Soviet enemy in them was a projection of America's worst impulses rather than an authentic fear of communists: "When the US forces in Iraq undertook their operation to capture Saddam Hussein, they called it… Operation Red Dawn. The irony of using this name for an operation in which we were the invaders was apparently lost on the Pentagon. Americans, it seems, will always take extreme measures to make sure that they psychologically remain the underdogs, that they can still shout “Wolverines!” with that sense of righteous fury, even as American forces more closely resemble [John] Milius’s brutal Soviet soldiers. It turns out that we were the foreign invaders all along."

This irony deficiency continues today, as President Trump declared ANTIFA to be a terrorist organization, despite it being an idea rather than an organization -- and despite the United States having fought costly wars against fascist regimes. So strange to see jingoistic patriots who a few years back embraced small-government Tea Party fantasies now embracing Big Brother oppression of citizens exercising their rights to assemble and to speak freely and of other citizens (Black Lives Matter) who claim their rights to life and liberty. One might say that it is contradictory for a president who loves eliminating regulations to also claim to be the law-and-order president, but it only seems like a contradiction. He and his supporters want to eliminate the laws that restrict their behavior in terms of economic and environmental exploitation and they want to get rid of the limits on their ability to silence and punish dissent. Look, for example, at the several states that have attempted to pass legislation criminalizing protests against oil pipelines. They love freedom: their freedom, not the freedom of others.

When I see armored personnel carriers rolling through residential neighborhoods and police trussed up in so much armor they look like Cylons or a character from Fallout, I wonder to what degree TV shows and films like Amerika were unconsciously prophetic; the United States was taken over by a fascist regime, but from the inside.

Of Thee I Sing: A Semiotic Review

I am reprinting this guest entry from Nov. 23, 2010 that originally appeared in The Weekly Rader. That was a blog by award-winning poet Dean Rader. He let me write an entry on occasion, and that is where my own blog got started. I am reprinting it because apparently Dean's blog has disappeared into the Internet ether. I am retrieving it from the Way Back Machine's Internet archives so it can live on, and so I can point my students toward it when needed.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Of Thee I Sing: A Semiotic Review by Scott Andrews

Scott Andrews has been so gracious so many times as a guest poster on The Weekly Rader, that we are considering renaming the blog The Bi-Weekly Andrews  Or, perhaps, the Don't Dread Scott.  We'll work on that and get back to you.

In our ongoing interest in the intersection of politics and early childhood education, we feature a particularly smart review of President Barack Obama's new children's book. In keeping with the focus of TWR, Andrews also considers the semiotics of this text.

President Barack Obama’s new book for children, Of Thee I Sing:  A Letter to My Daughters, made headlines lately – it is more accurate to say that the Fox News headline made headlines. His book briefly discusses several famous figures from American history, presenting them as heroes. Among those featured is Sitting Bull, the famous leader of the Lakota.  Fox News caught a good round of criticism for its “fair and balanced” headline about the book: “Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General.”

When it was pointed out that Sitting Bull did not kill General Custer, Fox News revised the headline to say “Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Defeated U.S. General.” Never mind that Sitting Bull was too old to participate in the Battle of Little Big Horn. 

There was much snickering from the Left at the contortions Fox News is capable of in finding ways to criticize Obama. What I haven’t heard yet is discussion of the image accompanying the passage about Sitting Bull.

Illustrator Loren Long portrays Abraham Lincoln and Billie Holiday in a fashion reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton, in warm colors and with curved, stylized figures. We see Lincoln and Holiday among other humans, doing things they are famous for – speaking and singing. We see Jackie Robinson swinging a bat. We see Albert Einstein staring into the heavens. We see Cesar Chavez speaking to migrant workers.

However, Sitting Bull is literally the Earth itself. His cheeks and nose are hills. His eyes are two bison. His eyebrows are trees. His forehead is an orange sunset. Although Sitting Bull is described as healing the “broken hearts and broken promises” of his people, we do not see any Indians.

Seeing the image of Sitting Bull as Real Estate is surprising in this context. A book like Of Thee I Sing is intended to remind us of famous, admirable people from American history – to make them visible to us again. It is odd, then, that in this act of remembrance, Sitting Bull is not present. In the book’s time machine, we travel back to see Abraham Lincoln speaking to his fellow Americans. In the time machine of our imagination, the book takes us back to see Billie Holiday singing, perhaps in a night club, among musicians. It is unclear that we have entered the time machine to visit Sitting Bull. Are we looking at his spirit in today’s landscape? Or have we traveled back to the western Plains in the 1800s? If so, where is Sitting Bull? Where are the people he led and healed?

This image is created in the tradition of “The Vanishing Indian.” American mythology has been deeply conflicted about the original inhabitants of the continent since Day One of Contact. Americans have hated Indians and they have loved Indians. But, strangely, in both cases the Indian disappears from view.

The side of the American psyche that hated Indians wanted to clear them out of the way of westward expansion, even if that meant killing them all. Thus the Indian became, for many decades, the ubiquitous villain of American popular fiction and Hollywood Westerns. In contrast to the bloodthirsty savage, the American hero could look that much more heroic – and could be justified in killing Indians. 

The side of the American psyche that loved Indians romanticized and envied them, and yet still imagined the Indians absent from the path of westward expansion. In American literature, sometimes the Indians disappeared voluntarily, because they did not want to live like their new neighbors. Sometimes the Indians disappeared tragically, perhaps from disease or even from hearts broken by the damage done to their communities. This passing was lamented by some Americans, and it was sometimes used to critique the American greed or violence or prejudice that so harassed Indians. But hardly ever in the American imagination did this critique result in the Indian not disappearing.

Sometimes what the American psyche hated about the Indian was also what it loved. The Indian Hater oftentimes justified his hatred by seeing the American as civilized and the Indian as savage. The task of transforming the landscape into European-style agricultural and urban landscapes was seen as a process of conquering nature.  Since the original inhabitants of the land needed to be removed before the land could be transformed, the Haters equated Indians with the land or nature. Both needed to be conquered. They were not merely obstacles to expansion, but as “nature” they were the opposite of “civilization.”  In his survey of Indians in American literature, Savagism and Civilization Roy Harvey Pearce says that the Indian became an important symbol “for what he showed civilized men they were not and must not be” (5). 

Meantime, the Indian Lover also equated Indians with the land or nature, but this time that was seen as a good thing.  Many times the Indian Lover had grown tired of his own society. Like the Hater, the Lover associated “civilization” with European-style society, but unlike the Hater he saw “civilization” as corrupt or decadent.  Pearce describes this as a type of “primitivism -- the belief that other, simpler societies were somehow happier than one’s own” (136). The Indian Lover saw “nature” as the opposite of “civilization,” as pure and noble. He saw the Indian as the Noble Savage, and in so doing he also equated the Indian with nature.

However, despite his admiration for Indians, the Lover could not bring himself to live with them permanently or imagine a role for them in his society. Apparently, just because you love something doesn’t mean you want to live with it. And so even those writers who loved Indians rarely ever ended a story with the Indian characters still around – they either died or faded into the landscape, headed further West, making room for the tide of Americans.

I do not know Loren Long, but I imagine he really likes Indians, or at least the idea of Indians.  And I bet he is a very nice man and a talented artist. But depicting Sitting Bull not as a human talking to other humans (like Lincoln) or singing with other musicians (like Holiday) has implications beyond the artist’s intent. It potentially relieves Long or his audience of depicting an uncomfortable truth – drawing the bodies of Indians whom we can guess will suffer and possibly die at the hands of American soldiers, who will become the victims of those “broken hearts and broken promises.” The words beneath the image beg the question: Broken by whom? As written and drawn, the audience gets to avoid uncomfortable answers.

Such an illustration also traps Sitting Bull in a non-human dimension. Unlike Lincoln or Holiday, Sitting Bull (and possibly by association every Indian) becomes a transcendent, supernatural being.  Not a human.

Of course, it is better to have an Indian in the book than not. But it would be nice to have an Indian who lives on the ground like a human rather than in the ground like a specter or ghost.

Scott Andrews is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and he teaches American and American Indian literatures at California State University, Northridge.