Anna-Maurine creatively uses the word “body-land” to emphasize the connection between the body and land and its meaning regarding indigeneity, queerness, and black sovereignty. She uses colons to connect different layers of meanings of body-land to articulate how inseparable the two pieces are at every level. In the discussion about black sovereignty, Anna-Maurine describes the tension between the state government that wants to use the tracts of land for national park construction and the indigenous people who want their lands to plant crops, live, and honor their existence. The author emphasizes the caveat that it is dangerous to think of indigenous people as vestigial or beyond the hope of reparation because it is an inaccurate account of the reality that reduces indigenous people to a special topic that rarely receives attention. Instead of using the deficit and passive perspective, Anna-Maurine focuses on indigenous people’s spiritual autonomy and its supported black sovereignty, which is a fight against colonialism and liberation Christianity logic. The author describes how the spiritual leader groups people together to fight off the government troops sent to take their lands. At the end of the chapter body-land, Anna Maurine delineates the apparently illogical interview data about how indigenous people identify themselves with negras or indios to show that indigenous people can be connected without blood and how lands connect with the identity, which in this case, is indigeneity.
I find this piece hard to read because it is a creative endeavor to introduce an ethnography project that might not be otherwise well articulated. Also, the author connects her research with many news and research that are listed in the footnotes. However, I cannot fully understand many of those sources in Spanish. I think the author is disrupting the regular logic that fails to describe the interdependence between people, nature, identity, and power. This way of writing is similar to Tsing’s “The Mushroom at The End of The World.” I feel like the author is talking about something substantial and important that is drastically different from everyday experiences. I can feel the degree of difference from her creative account, but I can capture little content without living experiences in North American indigenous areas.
Hi there! I agree that using the term body-lands was both interesting and insightful. I think that its continued use throughout the book is also a strategic move to prevent the readers from forgetting, or undermining, the significant link between the body (the person) and the land along with its history. I think that a significant theme of the book is the intersection of identities in shaping human experience, so I agree that the use of colons is significant for connecting different layers of meaning. I think this is really well articulated on page 64 where she considers how different environments, lands, interact with these identities. She writes, “to be queer : Black in Haiti carries a different meaning than to be queer : Haitian in the Dominican Republic or queer : Caribbean in New York City. Queer : Black is not a universal.”
I like how you brought up her emphasis on the myth of Indigenous extinction. I felt as though I was able to connect this to what I have learned about the US and the Indigenous extinction myth. In the early 1900s, when the dime novels became popular, Native Americans were initially portrayed as antagonists to the American protagonist in shaping American legends. These novels shaped them into mythological objects of the American frontier. I believe that this legacy of Native Americans as mythological objects has led to the modern-day use of Native American stereotypes to convey messages for advertisements, logos, and mascots for large corporations to profit off of. This is especially dangerous when the average person in the US has very limited contact with real Native Americans, and thus begins to associate them more with what corporate America has defined them as, rather than who they are.
So far this reading has been the most challenging for me compared to the other ethnographies that we’ve read. While I enjoyed how poetic and creative it was, I had a hard time unpacking certain parts of the body-lands chapter in particular.