Settler colonialism is a wound: Marinella Rodi-Risberg, ‘Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon: Trauma, Settler Colonialism, and Storytelling’, in Marinella Rodi-Risberg, Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers’ Incest Novels from the 1990s, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 113-140 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is a wound: Marinella Rodi-Risberg, ‘Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon: Trauma, Settler Colonialism, and Storytelling’, in Marinella Rodi-Risberg, Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers’ Incest Novels from the 1990s, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 113-140

07Apr22

Abstract: Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon (1994) connects sexual and racial traumas, economic disenfranchisement, and settler colonialism, situating incest against a background of land dispossession and genocide, specifically Cherokee removal and allotment. Thus, the protagonist’s individual experience of sexual abuse becomes emblematic of the treatment of Indians by the US government in a historical context. Underscoring how the traumatic effects of incest are connected with the historical trauma of land loss, the novel offers harsh critique on the harm done to the Indian population, in particular the women, on and off reservation. Bell testifies to the legacy of American Indian historical trauma through a literary technique reminiscent of Native storytelling as a form of literary activism, challenging stories that erase Native Peoples’ past and present presences from historical memory and creating new stories that not only bear witness to past struggles but also to American Indians’ current lives. Ultimately, through an appeal to the reader as witness, Bell’s story performs a belated witnessing to the trauma of incest that draws on the collective wounding of settler colonialism, reminding readers not only of the harm of injustice and oppression but also of resilience and resistance through the protagonist’s storytelling.

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