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Nation to nation: Kevin Bruyneel, ‘Review Essay on Seema Sohi’s Echoes of Mutiny and Suzan Shown Harjo’s Nation to Nation’, Tulsa Law Review, 52, 3, 2017

23May17

Excerpt: Suzan Shown Harjo, editor and multiple essay contributor to Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations, describes in the book’s introduction the experiences of her great-grandparents, “Thunderbird or Nonoma’ohtsevehtse (Richard Davis), and Nellie Aspenal,” as new “hostage-students” of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1879.1 After travelling half a continent by train, “[w]hen they arrived at Carlisle, their medicine pouches, moccasins, and comfortable clothes were confiscated. Their long hair was cut short, they were ‘deloused’ with kerosene, even though they did not have lice, and they were given scratchy uniforms and hard shoes, which never fit quite right. They often were whipped, or their mouths were rubbed raw and blistered with lye soap, for reasons they never knew. Thus began their so-called “civilization.”2 The sheer brutality, abuse, and torture of Indigenous children described here was done in the name of saving them from their own people’s seemingly primitive ways by assimilating them—‘civilizing’ them—to the western liberal individualist, capitalist practices, and norms of the settler colonial society.


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