Settler patriarchy: Jordan Lea Johnson, ‘Angelina in the Archives: Tracing Heteropatriarchy and Settler Colonialism in Local Histories of the Pineywoods’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 46, 3, 2025, pp. 121-151 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler patriarchy: Jordan Lea Johnson, ‘Angelina in the Archives: Tracing Heteropatriarchy and Settler Colonialism in Local Histories of the Pineywoods’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 46, 3, 2025, pp. 121-151

20Dec25

Abstract: This article draws on Native feminist theories and critical settler colonial studies to analyze the role of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism in local histories of the East Texas Pineywoods, occupied Caddo lands. Taking up accounts from the early modern colonial period alongside more contemporary examples, I conduct a feminist genealogical analysis of a Caddo woman known to the settler archive as Angelina. Characterized as the “Pineywoods Pocahontas” within local history and lore of East Texas, Angelina is situated within a legacy of Native women imagined to be aligned with colonial interests through their romanticized attachments to white settler men. As with other famous Native women, settler stories comprehend Angelina according to heteropatriarchal norms of gender and sexuality, imagining her as submissive and accommodating while framing colonization within a teleological narrative of US history. In colonial journals and memoirs, as well as contemporary paintings, murals, and local histories, settler stories frame Angelina through the lens of heteropatriarchy and colonial modernity, confining Caddo peoples and societies to a prehistoric past while eliding Caddo sovereignty in the present and denying Caddo futures. I apply Native feminist theorizations of gender, sexuality, and colonialism to representations of Angelina to denaturalize the heteropatriarchal replacement narratives that continue to authorize settlers as the rightful inhabitants of Caddo homelands, framing local history narratives and settler storytelling practices as one way that settler colonialism is romanticized in the past, enacted in the present, and normalized in the future.

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