It is not over, settler colonialism remains contested: Kay Yandell, ‘Indigeneity Buried, Then Unearthed, in Mohja Kahf’s “Fayetteville as in Fate” and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf’, MELUS, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

It is not over, settler colonialism remains contested: Kay Yandell, ‘Indigeneity Buried, Then Unearthed, in Mohja Kahf’s “Fayetteville as in Fate” and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf’, MELUS, 2024

17Aug24

Abstract: When Mohja Kahf met Winona LaDuke, Kahf referenced Native America’s long history of resistance against occupation, land theft, displacement, and genocide. Kahf couched her observation in assumptions that Indigenous Americans lost that battle, and that Native resistance has ended. Kahf notes her own feelings of mortification on hearing LaDuke’s response, that Native resistance is not over, and, on further research into Native history and modern Native lives, Kahf considers the ways that her poem “Fayetteville as in Fate” (written 1995, published 2003) and her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) engage in the sorts of simplified images and cultural appropriations that her earlier assumptions of the disappearance of Native resistance might engender. This kind of simplified vision of Native peoples and cultures is easy for Americans of all backgrounds to adopt inadvertently. LaDuke’s and her family’s own work, in fact, has long been accused of simplification, erasure, and cultural appropriation. Beth Link, for example, calls Winona LaDuke’s Ashkenazi mother, visual artist Betty Bernstein LaDuke, “a white artist whose subjects are exclusively people of color. [For Betty LaDuke,] non-white cultures and bodies can be mimicked and possessed by white artists without substantively critiquing power or legacies of colonization” (17). For American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means, Winona LaDuke’s Ojibwe father, spiritual practitioner Vincent LaDuke, or Sun Bear, “is a liar. . . . The most non-Indian thing about Sun Bear’s ceremonies is that he’s personally prostituted the whole thing by turning it into a money-making venture” (Churchill). Critics have accused Winona LaDuke herself of presenting romantic, essentialist, simplified visions of Native lifeways, in order to appropriate them for her own environmentalist imaginings. For Kimberly Tallbear, for instance, LaDuke’s All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999) “presents a very narrow definition of authentic tribal or indigenous identity, relies on simplistic traditionalist rhetoric, . . . then conditions legitimate governance on the restrictive definition of authentic indigenity that she assumes her readers will innately accept to be true” (234). Yet, even amid such accusations that LaDuke’s stories of Native political actions insist “that authentic indigenous cultures must be representative of a static, generic, and uncomplicated traditionalism” (Tallbear 241), LaDuke performs the desperately needed intellectual work of documenting, compiling, and publicizing modern Native nations’ determination to undergird and strengthen their tribal lands, endangered cultures, and national sovereignties.

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