Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (review)

Reviews NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 184 GINA STARBLANKET Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations by Mishuana Goeman University of Minnesota Press, 2013 INDIGENOUS WOMEN’S WRITINGS have received increased attention in recent years beyond the realm of literary studies for their important role in the deconstruction of gendered and colonial relations of power and for their contribution to Indigenous politics of self-determination. With her monograph Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations, Tonowanda Seneca author ­ Mishuana Goeman offers a unique contribution to this emergent field through an examination of the spatial dimensions of decolonization that exist within the literary works of Indigenous women. With this book, Goeman draws out the ways that settler and Indigenous conceptions of space collide with one another to implicate Indigenous women. At the same time, she also brings to light the discursive techniques through which these tensions are exposed and challenged by Indigenous women’s narratives. Goeman’s analysis is deployed through four chapters that take up the writings of Indigenous women from across the United States and Canada, including E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), Esther Belin (Diné), Joy Harjo (Creek), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) and others. Her review of various literary works elucidates the range of methods and terms that each author uses to foreground Indigenous conceptions of space, relationship, and autonomy. In conducting this study, Goeman’s aim is to reveal the political underpinnings and potency of Indigenous women’s writings. She does so by emphasizing the ways that these narratives function to disrupt gendered settler geographies and boundaries with the particular objective of Indigenous liberation from colonizing orders. Throughout the book, Goeman focuses her vision on the process of writing as activism, the revolutionary power of relationships, and the possibilities of confronting spatialized injustice in ways that transcend colonial models of territory, jurisdiction, and race. Through careful review of each author ’s engagement with different temporal periods, spatialities, and colonial premises, Goeman paints a comprehensive picture of the violence inherent in settler conceptualizations of geography and space. Her analysis exposes the realities of oppression that occur as colonizing forces continuously attempt to narrate relationships to the land and one another by defining borders between human beings through narrow categories based on race, sexuality, gender, and nation. Goeman demonstrates how each of the authors have NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Reviews 185 produced alternative mappings to colonial classifications by remembering, articulating, and sharing Indigenous discourses that function to counter the monolithic histories erected by colonial forces. Goeman’s engagement with the contributions of each author is conducted against the backdrop of U.S. and Canadian law and policy while simultaneously , and seemingly effortlessly, illuminating its global context and applicability . While authors such as Harjo and others place themselves in local sites, invoking embodied geographies and places, their writings speak broadly to the colonial and gendered violence of globalization while illustrating the multiple spatial scales available to Indigenous writers. Goeman demonstrates how Harjo’s articulated strategies guide readers toward a discourse that locates each of us “within the world, not just engaging it from the periphery or margin” (120). While Goeman’s collective analysis primarily invokes the works of four authors, she constructs an analytical frame that is applicable to the literary works of any Indigenous speaker or writer and identifies techniques useful for anyone seeking to deconstruct the spatialized dimensions of colonialism. A particular strength of this book involves Goeman’s recognition of the value inherent in multiple perspectives on the concept of decolonization. While the author spends most time with writings that are not predicated on the terms established by colonizing systems, she also acknowledges the importance of approaches that choose to engage with those terms to expose their logic of oppression. An example of this can be seen in Goeman’s analysis of Johnson’s efforts to highlight the barriers that liberal discourses present for gender equity and Indigenous rights (44). Rather than seeking to unsettle the liberal nation-state, Johnson’s stories elucidate its ideology and engage in processes of remapping the national terrain through the main characters’ struggles to make space for gender equity and equal rights for Indigenous nations within it. This approach...

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