Bite the Power: The Gentle Satire of Rutherford Falls

In an otherwise entertaining and insightful essay in The Atlantic about Sterlin Harjo and Reservation Dogs, David Treuer briefly compares the show with Rutherford Falls. He describes the latter as "toothless."

I think he is wrong.

Without getting into the topic of which show is better, I should acknowledge that the shows are very different -- despite sharing so many actors and writers. Reservation Dogs is more like an indie film, whereas Rutherford Falls is more like a mainstream comedy. (Treuer calls it a "feel-good sitcom," which is true.)

This makes sense when you consider the previous projects of their creators and the environments that produce them.

Harjo made several independent films (Barking Water, This May Be the Last Time), and he co-created the series with Taika Waititi, who has been launched from independent films (What We Do in the Shadows) to big studio movies (Thor: Ragnorak).  Rutherford Falls was created by TV comedy veterans: Ed Helms (The Daily Show, The Office), Michael Shur (The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place), and Sierra Teller Ornelas (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Happy Endings, Superstore).

Reservation Dogs emanates from FX Productions, which also produces It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Archer. Like those shows, it features irreverent topics and a great deal of cursing. The second season of Reservation Dogs seems to have the ambition of unseating The Sopranos for the most F-bombs per screen minute.

Rutherford Falls airs on Peacock (NBC's streaming service) alongside... surprise!... The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And also Modern Family and Psych. Combined F-bomb score: 0.

I believe Treuer sees "teeth" in Reservation Dogs' realism. It focuses on tough issues, such as the grief the band of young protagonists feel about the suicide of their friend, which fuels their desire to escape their reservation community. The show takes place in a poor neighborhood in the Muskogee Creek Nation in Oklahoma. People hustle, whether selling their own CDs or meat pies outside the IHS clinic.The gang steals what they can to raise money for their escape. Etc. The show alternates between pathos and comedy.

Meanwhile, in Rutherford Falls, set on the land of the fictional Minishonka Nation, we see no poverty. I believe that is part of the show's message and one of its contributions to the popular awareness of Native people: Poverty does not define all of Indian Country. There is little pathos in the show. It concentrates on humor and satire. 

Coincidentally, both shows are in their second season, and both shows this season feature episodes about the death a protagonist's female relative.

In Rutherford Falls, "Aunt Sue" is about the aftermath of the passing of a beloved family member. How to honor Aunt Sue in a memorial service at the tribal casino? (It will require "an insane amount of Buffalo Wild Wings" and "Bonny Rait at full volume.") Who inherits Aunt Sue's land -- the niece who works in the tribal cultural center or the nephew who is like a prodigal son? (The niece does not get the land, but she does get Aunt Sue's motorcycle.)

In Reservation Dogs, "Mabel" is about how the community comes together to help with the passing of a grandmother -- she is on her death bed, and her house is filled with friends, family, and food -- and how her granddaughter deals with the difficult emotion of saying goodbye to the woman who raised her after her mother's death. There is humor, but what I heard about most from the viewers I know were the tears. Good tears, but tears nonetheless. I do not think viewers were intended to cry about "Aunt Sue."

Reservation Dogs does not shy away from representing hardships in its Muskogee Creek community, but it does not devote much energy to the causes of those hardships. There are #LandBack signs and t-shirts sprinkled through episodes, but no one talks about how American Indian reservations are structured to keep Native populations in poverty. (You can read about some of those structures in "5 Ways the Government Keeps Native Americans in Poverty.")

Harjo's show has an indie film feel, whereas Rutherford Falls is more mainstream -- and, perhaps because of that or despite that, it engages with the dominant culture more explicitly, critiquing it (however gently). 

Despite what Treuer writes, we could say Rutherford Falls shows some teeth when it engages with  how museums represent Native people, how Native communities can use some tools of capitalism to fight the system that makes their lives difficult, or how Hollywood misrepresents Native culture and ritual. 

From the first season, one of the Rutherford Falls moments that circulated on social media was a speech from Terry Thomas (Michael Greyeyes), who is the CEO of the tribe's casino. He tells NPR reporter Josh Carter (Dustin Milligan) that the tribe has always adapted to survive the challenges it has faced, and corporate capitalism is just the latest challenge. He says corporate capitalism is just one model, and tribal capitalism can operate to benefit the whole community rather than just a few shareholders. He concludes the speech by saying, "I won't rest until my nation gets every single thing that was taken from them."  

You can watch the scene here.

Debbie Reese studies Native representations in children's literature and other media; she advises librarians and educators on how to select appropriate and accurate representations, and she recently tweeted to recommend content creators pay attention to Rutherford Falls.

She is referring to an episode about Rutherford Falls characters who become cultural advisors to Adirondack, a fictional drama that seems to spoof Yellowstone and Hollywood representations in general. The episode, "Adirondack S3," opens with a scene from that show, which, ironically, is popular in the Minishonka community of Rutherford Falls. In it, the white protagonist is helping defend the Native community from losing its land to a greedy corporation. As he speaks the line -- "Can't you see, after all we have done to erase these people, they are noble keepers of the land?" -- he steps in front of Chief Night Pipe, making him disappear.

Even those who think they are helping can be part of the problem.

The cultural advisors to Adirondack discover that the show's creators want Native imagery, but not true representation. Behind the scenes of the show within the show, the advisors discover the producers are making up "Indian culture" as they wish. In this, they echo a concept from Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor. In his book Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence, he writes that representations of Native people from the dominant culture (museums, popular fiction, movies, advertising) are a "cultural concoction of bourgeois nostalgia." For Vizenor, these representations may look like Natives, but, in an irony lost on their creators, they signal the absence of any real Native rather than their  presence. 

The cultural advisors from the Minishonka Nation learn that the show's producers do not want accurate Native representation in their show, so they give the producers every cliche, exaggeration, and invention they can. Their goal is to make fools of the producers, who do not realize they are being tricked. 

Rutherford Falls may not bear fangs -- it is too gentle for that -- but it does have some bite.

 

Welcome Home, Irene: A Reservation Dogs Multiverse?

DC and Marvel have their universes. Some characters have their own multiple timelines, as they live out different destinies simultaneously. 

Perhaps Sterlin Harjo has one too.

He is the co-creator of Reservation Dogs, which tells the story of four young Muskogee Creek friends as they cope with the obstacles of growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma -- and as they overcome the grief of their friend's suicide. 

I thought of how some of Harjo's works might fit together -- ala DC and Marvel -- when I saw the second episode of the first season, "NDN Clinic." For me, the episode connected to two earlier Harjo films, the short Goodnight, Irene (2005) and the indie feature Barking Water (2009).

The three involve Indian Health Services, and they either complete a narrative arc for Irene or perhaps suggest parallel lives for her.

Casey Camp-Horinek plays Irene in two films, and she is listed as "Grandma" in the Reservation Dogs episode, but I like to think she is Irene there too. In that episode, she calls from her hospital room to Cheese (Lane Factor) as he walks by her door. She calls him "Grandson" and convinces him to take her out of the hospital. 

Goodnight, Irene suggests this is the hospital where she dies. The short film's final shot is of Irene walking alone down a long hallway.

Perhaps in one timeline she does die there. Perhaps in another timeline, she is rescued by Cheese.

In the short film, Camp-Horinek plays an older woman who has come to the clinic for her last visit. What she suffers from is not named, but the film suggests she will not be going home. She spends the day with two men in the waiting room. They are not named -- IMDB indicates them as "Young Man" (Robert A. Guthrie) and "Middle-age Man" (Jon Proudstar). She tells them she was married to Pete Harjo, who was apparently a popular barber before he passed away. 

In Barking Water, the tables are turned, and she rescues Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman) so he will not die in the same clinic. They were a couple, and despite Frankie's bad behavior then, Irene helps him escape to say goodbye to his daughter and granddaughter. 

(Whitman also appears in Reservation Dogs, playing Old Man Fixico. He is not seen with Grandma.)

Although Goodnight, Irene was released before Barking Water, in my reconstruction, its events take place before. Perhaps Irene had an unhappy relationship with Frankie after Pete Harjo died, and then she rescues him from the IHS clinic before going there herself. (Or perhaps this is an alternate timeline in which she never meets Pete.)

Then in "NDN Clinic" she receives the reward she earned by helping Frankie when Cheese rescues her (and becomes her adopted grandson). The episode ends with Cheese and Grandma sitting outside the clinic, enjoying the outdoors, so it does not explicitly depict an escape, but in the final episode of the first season, "Satvrday," he visits Grandma in her home -- she clearly made it out alive.

There are even some call backs or Easter Eggs in "NDN Clinic" that suggest a connection to Goodnight, Irene. (According to IMDB, that is Harjo's first credit as a film director and he also wrote the script.) You can watch it on YouTube here. For instance, when "Middle-Aged Man" checks in at the front desk, he bleeds on the admission form. (The actor also signs his real name, Jon Proudstar.)

When Bear (D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) checks in at possibly the same desk in "NDN Clinic," he also bleeds on the form.

Three drops each time. Coincidence? I will let you decide.

Perhaps the biggest Easter Egg is that Middle-age Man tells Irene he has a three-year-old daughter. The same actor plays Leon in Reservation Dogs. He is the father of Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis). Does the little girl mentioned in Goodnight Irene grow up to be the inimitable, laconic, big-hearted Willie Jack?

I think so. At least she does in my SHU.

Addendum (09/08/2022): Theory Confirmed. In the seventh episode of the second season, "Stay Gold, Cheesy Boy," Cheese is lying in a foster care bunk bed and looking at his notebook. For a brief moment, we see this page:

 

 

Translating Rutherford Falls

Twitter can be a scary pool to dip your toes into.

If you comment about a popular topic, use a trending hashtag, or tag someone famous, your tweet can get attention you may not have wanted. 

For instance, earlier this year I made a snarky comment about the array of bad haircuts Jon Bernthal has sported in his various film and TV roles. I did not tag him, but he saw and liked the tweet. Soon that tweet had more than 15,000 impressions. (I commented on the tweet to make it clear I thought he was a fine actor.)  

No one attacked me (or my own haircuts), but the number of impressions made me nervous. I was uncomfortable getting that much attention, especially for a comment that might be considered mean.

Even when there is no risk of generating bad karma, a bunch of impressions can scare me. In August 2021, when The Chair was popular on Netflix, I tweeted a pitch for a show about adjunct faculty members. It received more than 46,000 impressions and more than 400 likes.

 

These thoughts came to mind recently after I saw an episode of Rutherford Falls from its second season on Peacock (NBC's streaming service). In the season's second episode, Feather Day (Kaniehtiio Horn) walks into the office of tribal casino executive Terry Thomas (Michael Greyeyes) and speaks in Mohawk. Her comment is not translated on the screen, and the closed captioning states "speaking Mohawk." She and Terry then have a discussion in English, and she exits the meeting with another untranslated Mohawk comment.

 

This prompted me to ask on Twitter about the lack of translation.

 Not long after that, showrunner Sierra Teller Ornelas replied.

This is where the "fog of Twitter" comes in. Ornelas does not know me. We were not having a conversation about this episode. She had little context in which to "hear" my tweet. Was she hearing a complaint? Was she hearing snark? Her reply seemed a little defensive to me, calling back to a 50-year-old film to explain the lack of translation. Perhaps defensive is not the right word. Resentful? Irritated? I do not know her. This was not part of a conversation we were having. I had little context in which to "hear" her reply.

Perhaps she had second thoughts about her response, because a few moments later she added another reply:

As the "likes" for her response surpassed the "likes" on my original post, I wondered if I was getting dunked on. Did the people who liked her response think I was a dunderhead? 

As I say, she does not know me. She does not know that I teach American Indian literature and American Indian Studies. She does not know that I talk about Rutherford Falls in class as an example of Native self-representation, as an example of visual sovereignty.

My Twitter profile mentions my teaching and my citizenship in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, so perhaps Ornelas checked that out and decided my question was legit. 

I understand the impulse to not translate the Mohawk language. This decision might be related to a concept I discuss with my students: ethnographic refusal.   

This describes the refusal of a Native person to explain their experiences, beliefs or cultural practice to an outsider, such as an anthropologist. This refusal makes sense in light of how knowledge of Native people has been misused and misinterpreted by the dominant cultures of the United States and Canada. Audra Simpson discusses this concept in her book titled Mohawk Interruptus. 

I have heard the term also applied to creative decisions by writers, artists, and filmmakers. They have a story to tell, and they know non-Native people will be in their audience, but they refuse to have characters or narrators explain everything for them. Since so many members of nearly any audience are non-Native, great pressure can be applied to Native creators to explain everything. Native creators may resist that pressure because having a character explain the significance of a symbol, statement, ritual, or belief does not feel right aesthetically. They also might resist because explaining would reveal to outsiders some important cultural element that a Native community would prefer be concealed.

When discussing this element in my classes, I talk about the "anthropological curiosity" or "anthropological voyeurism" that some non-Native audience members bring to a book or movie. Some people in the audience are more invested in learning the cultural secrets of American Indian communities than how the central conflict is resolved or whether the characters are well drawn. This kind of curiosity can be tiresome for the Native creator who is most interested in telling a good story.

From what Feather and Terry say in English just after she enters, I assume her Mohawk statement was some kind of dig at his fancy office. That does not seem like sensitive cultural information or insider knowledge. Other things in the show are not explained, such as the inside joke of characters saying "Skoden" and "Stoodis." These words are rez-speak for "Let's go then" and "Let's do this" -- especially as challenges to a fight. These are titles for two episodes of the first season, and characters say these things to each other, but no one explains what the words mean. If you know, you know. 

However, the decision to not translate Feather's Mohawk dialog because "It's not there to be explained" seems odd for a show like Rutherford Falls, because it spends a lot of time explaining things to its audience. In fact, I think one way the show is valuable to the general audience is how much it explains. One of its central characters, Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms), seems to be a stand-in for the non-Native audience members. His function is to learn from his Native friends and alter his behavior and beliefs according to what he learns. 

An example of  the show explaining things for the benefit of its audience occurs in the second-season episode titled  "Land Back," when Nelson (Dallas Goldtooth) tells Reagan Wells (Jana Schmeiding) that the artifacts in the tribe's museum collection want to be handled and visited with rather than be stored away or handled only with gloves. He tells her, "They've been kept away for far too long. Each of these items has an energy. They want to breathe. They want to be held. This doll wants us to visit with them." During his remarks, she looks at him skeptically, but this is a concept Reagan should be familiar with. She has a master's degree in Museum Studies, and she is dedicated to decolonizing the curation and presentation of her tribal heritage. She would know what he is doing when she sees him talking to the items in the collection. However, many people in the audience probably are not familiar with that idea. He explains it to her for their benefit.

Part of the cultural work performed by Rutherford Falls is explaining contemporary Native life to a non-Native audience. When I use the phrase "cultural work," I am thinking of Jane Tompkins' book Sensational Designs, in which she discusses the ways literature can "redefine the social order." Television shows can be very effective at doing this, changing the way audiences think about people different from themselves. In this case, redefining how non-Native people think of American Indians. Shows like Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs, by placing so much of their production in the hands of Native directors, producers, writers, and actors, can alter the stereotypical impressions so many Americans have of Native people.

Too many Americans think of Native people as living in the past. They identify American Indians with signs of the 18th century, with tipis and headdresses, etc. Even when they know that Native people live contemporary lives, the role they expect for Native people in popular culture is the Noble Warrior or the Bloodthirsty Savage, etc.  These two shows do the important work of representing Native people living thoroughly contemporary lives. 

I thought not translating Feather's Mohawk comments was interesting because Hollywood has often treated Native languages as interchangeable or, worse, not worth translating. A famous example is John Ford's The Searchers. The American Indian characters in that film are supposed to be Comanches, but many of the actors were Navajo. They spoke their language, but the film pretended it was Comanche they were speaking. The non-Native audience would not know the difference, and it did not matter what the actors actually said, since the captions would state whatever Ford wanted them to. 

 

Such events are depicted in Reel Injun, a documentary about Hollywood's representations of Native people. That film presents a clip from a Hollywood Western, A Distant Trumpet (1964), with accurate captions instead of the originals. The Native actors are insulting the white characters, calling them snakes who crawl through their own shit, but this is not what the film's captions state. The film crew had no idea what the Native actors were saying. They probably did not care. You can watch the scene here.

The worst example is when a film states simply [speaking in foreign language]. Languages are not foreign to everyone. They are not foreign to their speakers. Refusing to translate the dialog seems dismissive. "What these characters are saying does not matter."

I think all languages should be translated and captioned for film and television. Characters make statements for reasons, and their dialog communicates motivations and intentions -- even if no other characters on the screen can understand what is said.

Hollywood has a history of dismissing Native languages, and so I like to see them translated on the screen. I think translating and captioning Native languages acknowledges them as carriers of meaning, treats them as equal to other languages. I know Rutherford Falls means no disrespect to the Mohawk language by not translating it; this is just my personal preference. 

Finally, one contribution to the Twitter conversation made an excellent point about captioning and translating Native languages. If someone is a Mohawk language speaker but is also hearing impaired, they would appreciate the captioning service, even if the dialog is untranslated. Excellent point!

Big laughs in little towns

In the course of writing about Diné experiences of time and relationships to place, poet Jake Skeets relates a joke his father told about a town in the Navajo Nation. When I saw the joke in "The Other House: Musings on the Diné Perspective of Time" in Emergence Magazine, I was reminded of a similar joke about a place in Texas which also has a name that can be challenging for out-of-towners.

First, Skeets's joke:

There is a joke my father told me as a child. Language and culture loss continue to worry many Diné elders on our reservation; there are several revitalization efforts ongoing to address these losses. As a result, high school students can take Navajo language classes to fulfill foreign language requirements, and most universities and colleges now recognize Navajo as a foreign language, despite its millennia-long existence in the Southwest and its Athabascan relatives to the north and south. The joke my father told captures the politics of language and culture loss and revitalization within a singular punch line. The joke takes place in Chinle, Arizona, a small town located near the heart of the Navajo Nation. Its place name in Diné is Chʼínílį́. The joke is as follows: Two men are arguing over a meal about the correct pronunciation of Chinle. One says they are in Chinle, using the English pronunciation. The other says they are in Chʼínílį́, using the Diné pronunciation. To settle the dispute, one stops a restaurant worker and asks her, “Are we in Chinle or Chʼínílį́?” The worker replies, “Sir, you are in Burger King.” The joke acknowledges the existence of a Burger King near the heart of the Navajo Nation.

This joke reminded me of one told by the late, great Larry Jones. I worked with him in the 1980s at the University of North Texas, where he was the art director of the publications office and I was a writer in the media relations office. He was one of the funniest people I have ever known. He was one of those people who were funny whether or not they intended to be. He grew up in the small Texas city of Mexia. Pronouncing the city's name can be challenging for some people. This was Larry's joke:

Two men are eating together in a small town, and they are arguing about how to pronounce its name. One insists it is "Muh-hay-yu." The other insists it is "Mex-ee-ya." Finally, they call over their waitress to settle the dispute. One of the men asks the waitress, "You're a local. How do YOU pronounce the name of this place?" She looks at them a moment, and then she says, slowly, "Day-ree Kween."

The jokes are similar enough to make me wonder if Skeets's joke is being misremembered. I think the Mexia version works better. The set-up is stronger if the disputed names of the town are not mentioned to the restaurant employee. If the waitress does not understand their argument, she thinks they do not know how to pronounce the name of an iconic small-town restaurant. The Mexia punchline depends upon the apparent misunderstanding between the waitress and the disputing friends -- and upon her possible impression that these two men are not very bright.

I also wonder if the punchline to Skeets's joke is being influenced by the popular "Sir, this is an Arby's" meme. You can find it discussed at the Know Your Meme website. In this meme category, someone delivers a monologue that is deeply personal or controversial, and that is followed by "Sir, this is an Arby's," which suggests the comments are inappropriate or, at best, no one asked and no one cares.

However, I am not going to tell someone they do not correctly recall their father's joke. Perhaps Skeets's version is appreciated because it suggests the Burger King staff member does not care about the correct pronunciation of the town's name. Or perhaps it suggests the Burger King staff member does not know the correct pronunciation and avoids the question.

Reading Skeet's joke and recalling my friend's Mexia joke made me wonder if there is a punchline version of "klang association." That is when we cannot recall the correct word for something and our brain grabs a word or phrase that sounds right. For example, referring to varicose veins as "very close veins." Varicose is an unusual word. Most people do not know what it means nor why certain types of veins are called that; so their brains grab a combination of familiar words that sound like it might make sense: perhaps having veins that are too close together would cause problems?

We have heard so many jokes and seen so many memes, how can our brains keep them all straight? There may be some mixing and matching going on in our mental inventory of punchlines.

Regardless, Chinle and Mexia are fine towns; you should visit them. Skeets is a talented writer and poet; you should look for his stuff. And Larry was a hoot; I wish you could have met him.

Skeets's prize-winning collection of poems, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, is available from Milkweed Editions. He has another essay about Diné memory in Emergence Magazine, "The Memory Field: Musings on the Diné Perspective on Time, Memory, and Land."

 

Jouissance, Survivance, and Native Eroticism

The following is essentially the script for my presentation at the American Indian Workshop conference in July 2021. The conference was titled "The Sovereign Erotic." The presentation repeats much of my previous post on Billy-Ray Belcourt's book A History of My Brief Body, but it continues playing with the combination of the terms "survivance." "resistance," and "jouissance" into a new word: jouissistance. I use Joshua Whitehead's novel Jonny Appleseed and Tenille Campbell's poetry collection #IndianLovePoems as examples for exploring the term's possibilities.

I wish to thank the AIW organizers, especially James Mackay, for their hard work, and I want to thank those who attended the panel on "Theorizing the Erotic" for their attendance, patience, and insightful comments. You can view the full program here.

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The word “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.

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.

 

I encountered the word so often as I read his 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 our field by Anishinaabe theorist and writer Gerald Vizenor, and now it is ubiquitous.

Frequently, it is understood (perhaps misunderstood) 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. Therefore, any act of survival is an act of resistance for Native people.

However, Vizenor means more than “survival + resistance” 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: Literary Theory and Practice,” 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 Billy-Ray Belcourt, feeling joy can be 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 used 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. 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.

At about the time I was preparing this presentation, this tweet appeared to make my point:

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, as a result of society's disapproval, they may resent their body for its queerness.

Therefore, queer Native jouissance can be easily understood as subversive or transgressive, as it resists negation from without. It is sustaining because it resists negation from within.

This joy makes life more desirable, makes imagining a bright future more possible.

Jouissistance is useful for the futurity that Belcourt writes to create.

With A History of My Brief Body (2020), Belcourt seeks to “keep brown queer joy in the world… a world-to-come imbued with brown queer possibility” (126-127).

Understanding Native sexuality as resistance is not new. Back in 2000, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm wrote, “Indigenous erotica is political” (98). Writing for an issue of The Journal of Canadian Studies (35.3), 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.

My presentation thus far has been drawn from a blog entry written about my reaction to Belcourt’s book. What I would like to do with my remaining time is explore this concept of jouissistance further. I would like to try sharpening its definition, and I would like to see how it might help appreciate other texts.

What seems to be the fundamental elements of jouissistance?

Its appearance suggests the concept combines jouissance (joy) and resistance. I think that basic combination is useful both practically and aesthetically or critically.

Jouissance + Resistance = Jouissistance?

However, the definition of jouissance from Cixous’s book provides sexual associations for jouissance. Therefore, the concept of jouissistance might be most useful for referring to sexual pleasure as an act of resistance.

To better refine the concept I am test-driving here, I could ask: Is all consensual Native sex an act of resistance?

Can consensual sex with a non-Native partner be an act of resistance?

Is sexual sovereignty the same thing as jouissistance?

Finally, as I suggested above: does this concept of jouissistance include elements of survivance? Is survivance embedded in the neologism although it is not visible? Should the word be jouissivance?
 

To test-drive this concept, I looked at a couple of recent works by Native authors.

I looked at Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed (2018) and Tenille K. Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems (2017).

As I considered these texts, I noticed three distinctions among the sexual encounters narrated by Whitehead and Campbell.

1. Subversive sexual activity
2. Sexual sovereignty
3. Sexual survivance

These categories are inter-related. You can exercise your sexual sovereignty in order to subvert colonialism. You can be sexually subversive and yet not be fully sovereign in that action. Also, some acts could be perceived as sexually subversive, but in actuality they could be examples of false consciousness.

However, the fullest expression of the concept I am playing with – jouissistance – is the third: sexual joy that enacts continuity with one’s ancestors, one’s descendants, and, many times, the land.

The narrator of Whitehead’s novel enacts resistance through his sexuality by performing sex acts over the phone for money, and he occasionally meets his clients for in-person sex.
 
What makes these sexual encounters acts subversive rather than merely commodifications?  This is an important question, since, during the brief time period of the novel’s events, all of his customers are non-Native.

The narrator views his sexual encounters as reversals of typical power dynamics. Much like those imagined in Kent Monkman’s parodic North American landscape paintings.

Daniel Boone's First View of Kentucky

Additionally, the money he is raising from these customers will be used to travel home to his reserve for his stepfather’s funeral. He does not care much about his stepfather, but he is eager to reconnect with his mother and grandmother.

In this sense, his sexual encounters help maintain his connections to home, family, and community. The dominant culture that fetishizes his Native body also seeks to destroy it, but he is exploiting that contradictory desire to maintain his Native self.
 

His narrator states: “I may be the sexual fantasy, but I’m also the one in the driver’s seat” (8).

But do these monetized sexual encounters count as “pleasure” in the way Belcourt discusses in A History of My Brief Body or as I suggest by discussing Cixous’s meaning of jouissance?

He enjoys having this sense of power over his customers, but I wonder if this counts as joy. Should all pleasure count as joy? I do not know.

An interesting aspect of sexual sovereignty, of sexual self-determination, is that it can be asserted within the Native community and not only against settler community.

Jonny describes sexual encounters with straight Native young men when he was in high school. Despite the public homophobia of his Native community, he enjoys the private gay encounters with the young men. He states, "… I found my own sustenance from making straight NDN boys love me like their pow wow trail hook ups” (81).

When I wrote about A History of My Brief Body, I described the negation of gay Native bodies by settler society and by Native communities that have assumed many settler values. That attempted negation of his queer Native self is countered several times in Jonny Appleseed. For instance, when describing those high school seductions, Jonny writes, “And I always left a red mark on their bodies somewhere, as if to say: I was here” (187).

His transactional encounters with non-Native clients are understood as acts of revenge, as a temporary reversal of conquest. However, his encounters with the straight Native men in high school are described as mutually beneficial, as healing for both parties.

He writes, “I loved seeing the blood throb in their veins, popping like earthworms on their forearms and wrists – blood that said I’m surviving and you can too” (81). 

Their sexual pleasure were manifestations of Native survival and continuity.

For Jonny these are acts of sexual sovereignty within his Native community. For both parties they were acts of sexual subversion, as they resisted settler attempts to negate all Native bodies, queer and otherwise.

This dynamic of public heterosexuality and private homosexuality is manifested most clearly in Jonny’s relationship to Tias, a young man from his community.

With Tias he has an emotional rather than transactional relationship. Their bond is based on sexual attraction and shared experiences.

The narrator recalls their first physical encounter, when they surveyed each other’s naked bodies, observing wounds from their childhood on the Reserve. Jonny states, “I knew then that I loved him. Funny how an NDN 'love you' sounds more like, 'I’m in pain with you' " (88).

While Jonny’s clients provide income to sustain him, his relationship with Tias sustains him emotionally. Rather than fetishize Jonny’s body, Tias loves it; therefore, I think, their sexual relationship can more readily fit the notion of “joy” that my little neologism suggests.

However, Tias’ attraction to Jonny is conflicted because Tias is bisexual. When he gets his girlfriend pregnant, he feels he must choose her and his child over Jonny.

Vizenor describes survivance as “an active resistance and repudiation of dominance, obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry.” I think it is easy to see how joy is a powerful counter to these things.

To illustrate this concept, Vizenor tells three stories of Native people telling stories that evoke the presence of ancestors, of relatives, or a community and its vitality. For me, this is a key concept to survivance. It is about not merely the presence or survival of a Native person but the active presence of ancestors with and through that Native person.

Therefore, my understanding of survivance involves an element of transcendence. That is, it involves something greater than an individual subjectivity. And it involves a kind of temporal transcendence: something considered to be “past” is demonstrated as “present.”

If we can think of survivance as a kind of transcendence, we can perhaps consider it an example of excess, of something that exceeds the limits of one person. As an act of resistance, we could think of it as exceeding settler control.

This notion of transcendence brings me to jouissance in the way I described it earlier from the glossary for Cixous’ book The Newly Born Woman. Recall that she associates jouissance with sexual ecstasy that is “more than Total, something extra.” Cixous is discussing female orgasms (in particular multiple orgasms) as exceeding patriarchal control and therefore threatening patriarchy.

I find it tempting to extend her notions of the transcendent, excessive, subversive qualities of female orgasms to Native orgasms, whether they are male, female, or otherwise. Straight, gay, or otherwise.

All of this is to say that jouissistance in its ultimate or maximum expression involves jouissance and survivance. This is illustrated in Whitehead’s novel in a dream sequence in which he is the bottom to a bear’s top.

While Jonny is ravished in the mud, he hears a round dance (a communal dance) and the presence of other non-human people, rabbit and beaver. His body and mind are penetrated in multiple ways. His body is penetrated in search for his “tapwewin,” which I believe means “truth” or “something that tells the truth” in Cree.

As the bear withdraws from Jonny’s body, the young man ejaculates into the mud. He writes, “… all this treaty land is filled with me” (71).

This scene illustrates a sexual ecstasy that exceeds Jonny’s body and mind. He surrenders to something stronger than himself, something older than himself. He becomes one with the land, which we can think of as the ultimate signifier of his Oji-Cree community, history, belief, life, etc. Jonny’s survival is more than his own presence; it is part of the presence of all those things.

To close, I will turn briefly to similar examples of jouissistance in Tenille Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems. In her short, sexy free verse poems, Campbell describes sexual pleasure as subversive sexual activity, sexual sovereignty, and sexual survivance.
 

Whitehead’s narrator describes sex with non-Natives as reversals of conquest. Campbell does the same. In #1608 the speaker describes her first intercourse with a white man, her “first john smith” who tries to claim “me and mine.” She ends the act on top of him, “gazing down at conquered goods” (46).

The speaker in #47 describes herself as Christopher Columbus claiming the body of a white man with “my lips and tongue and taste, claiming it as mine, mine, mine” (36). His skin is figured as a treaty signed with hickeys.

Like Jonny fulfilling the savage fantasies of settler customers, Campbell’s speaker plays to similar fantasies in order to gain temporary sexual pleasure, but without losing self-determination. In #782 the speaker tells of a white man’s desire to act upon his “white guilt and privilege” and encourage her to perform like an actress in a pornographic film. However, he never understands “that my power is beyond your control” (84).

Some of her poems also express acts of sexual sovereignty, sometimes as resistance against colonization and sometimes resisting definition or control by her Native community.

Poem #608 declares the speaker’s refusal to be defined by the desires or fantasies of her white lovers. She writes, “I define my sexuality/ I define my boundaries/ I decide/ who I take into my bed/ into my mouth/ into my body/ into my heart” (94). 

 
Tribal traditions can be normative, and Native communities can be controlling. Campbell’s poems express a sexual sovereignty when the speaker refuses to be defined by “traditions,” even when those are described positively in other poems. Poem #96 acknowledges her Cree lover’s desire for her to believe in “his indigenizing dreams,” but “he’s the marrying kind… looking for forever kind of romance” and she’s “just looking for tonight’s feast” (53).

In several poems of the collection, we can find the third kind of sexual joy as resistance that I described above. We can find jouissance and survivance combined.

Finally, Campbell expresses the combination of jouissance and survivance in a few of the poems. In discussing survivance, Vizenor describes the evocation of ancestors through language, which Campbell does in #254. At the moment of climax, the speaker swallows the names of her ancestors “in the sweet rush of release” when she wants to “moan out loud/ my victory/ and his” (14).

Tanja Grubnic [who also presented at the conference] understood this swallowing the names of ancestors as an act of protection, keeping them from the male lover, whom Grubnic understood as white. One clue for the racial identity of the male lover for Grubnic was the poet saying that sometimes she forgets his name. This could be understood as an act of erasure (reversing the colonial power relationship that I have discussed earlier), and swallowing the names of her ancestors could be the speaker protecting them from the danger of erasure by the settlers.

That is an interesting reading, and I cannot say it is wrong. However, the poet also describes the desire to celebrate her “victory” – her orgasm – but his as well. The desire to celebrate the male lover’s victory could trouble the inference that he is a settler.

An imagistic or formal tension in the poem is the simultaneous swallowing and releasing. Regardless of one’s ultimate interpretation of the poem, we can acknowledge the presence of the speaker's ancestors in the moment of her sexual pleasure. In this moment of jouissance, the presence of ancestors and community is evoked.
 
In #2001, the speaker imagines her sexual pride and pleasure echoing experiences of her ancestors. The poem describes another kind of oral tradition, one that revives an indigenous language and instills indigenous joy: "broken Cree words/ whisper down my body/ between my legs/ into my universe/ where you tell me stories/ with tongue and lips/ and I take/ tradition into me/ until I burst." The speaker's pleasure helps her feel connected to previous generations: "this is what my ancestors/ must have felt like" (42).

In #903, while describing her lover “lapping up the sugar between my legs,” the speaker moans for “ancestral strength” as she “crested waves filled with visions/ of lust and love and/ pleasure” (98).

We could understand this call for ancestral strength to be satirical. Someone might make a similar call for strength to avoid the temptation of ordering dessert. It could be ironic humor.

But it is not necessarily that. Or necessarily only that. This moment fits a pattern in other poems of jouissance and survivance. For some, these moments may seem uncanny. It may seem like an odd juxtaposition: do many of us think of our grandparents while getting our groove on? For others, such as Belcourt, Whitehead, and Campbell, the connection is familiar.

In their work we can see the potential of sexuality to be a conduit of transcendent strength. Sexual pleasure can be understood as a method of evoking Native presence, of enabling resistance and continuity.