Articles & Chapters by Joshua D Miner
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020
Indigenous photobomb memes emerged on social networks as a media practice alongside contemporary ... more Indigenous photobomb memes emerged on social networks as a media practice alongside contemporary activist campaigns, where artists insert pop culture content into digitized ethnographic photographs already in use as mainstream meme fodder. This article takes a materialist approach to such memes to explore how the technical processes of digital image editing function ideologically. Meme series by Kiowa-Choctaw artist Steven Paul Judd and others illustrate how compositing methods like cloning and healing tools may disrupt ethnographic photographs’ claims to history, interrogating the aesthetic systems that underwrite settler-colonial media. As these algorithmic processes remediate the digitized image and re-situate it relative to other photoshopping practices, they bear a trace of settler digitality that allows such memes to intervene in current cultural debates and aesthetic trends. Circulation via social media generates a web of twice-remediated memes, which always refer back to their prior analog and digital iterations.
Surveillance & Society, 2020
Recent Indigenous boarding school movies have emphasized representations of surveillance together... more Recent Indigenous boarding school movies have emphasized representations of surveillance together with the “living dead” as a central motif. After a brief review of surveillance in Indian education, this essay examines a cycle of films—The Only Good Indian (2009), Savage (2009), The Dead Can’t Dance (2010), Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), and SNIP (2016)—wherein the practices and technologies of surveillance mediate a dynamic interplay between settler educational institutions and the Native runaway or truant. These films converge a popular undead motif with this longstanding genre figure of resistance by Native/First Nations children to settler systems of administration, drawing on its literary formation that extends back to the first Indigenous writing on federal Indian education. Within this larger field of what we may call Indigenous surveillance cinema, discourses of bureaucratic rationality frame the figure of the truant. These films articulate the ways that representational practices ranging from literacy to cinema uphold systems of identification by which administrative surveillance of Indigenous people continues. Cinematic representations of the supervision of Indigenous bodies recall settler-colonialism’s mobilization of an array of early surveillance technologies for the assimilation of Native children. In this context, the watchful eye of the teacher—a proxy for administrative media—suggests a deeper embedding in settler systems of control. A visual poetics of truancy emerges in Indigenous surveillance cinema, as the truant figure operates dialectically with settler surveillance. The truant spatializes settler management and surveillance in her desire to escape cultural conversion at the hands of these proliferating technologies of representation.
Information, Communication, & Society, 2020
The impact of crowdsourced data visualization in the Missing and
Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW... more The impact of crowdsourced data visualization in the Missing and
Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW) movement over the last
decade reveals how institutional systems of organizing and
representing space present a key obstacle to the cause. Activists’
digital crowdmaps express an ethos of Indigenous data
sovereignty, or self-determination in data collection and
application, that interrogates settler data procedures relative to
gender violence. These tactical maps resonate with the circulation
of location-tagged photographs via social media campaigns like
#ImNotNext and #RedDressProject to similarly critique the
datasets of government agencies. This article conceptualizes both
media forms as informatic images that intervene in settler
cartographic practice as part of an ongoing decolonization of
digital mapping tools. Informatic images precondition the ways
that users interact with data through hypermediated visual
systems. Here, digital mapping and locative media practices
focalize a relationship between violence, biased data and space,
through various methods of layering, compositing and linking.
Settler computational structures undergird these affordances, yet
in a tactical context mapped images are reconstituted by user
interaction with an oppositional dataset to intervene in that
framework. Users’ emergent data of presence and absence plot a
distributed landscape of settler violence in accordance, instead,
with relational Indigenous knowledges.
Gamevironments, 2020
The last decade has seen open-world design transform the western genre in video games by recenter... more The last decade has seen open-world design transform the western genre in video games by recentering land as a thematic and mechanical component. As a description of both environment design and gameplay, open worlds offer highly interactable spaces, made coherent by narrative despite limited spatial linearity. A subjective camera that constructs the player’s perspective aids in this coherence. This article examines subjective rendering, a modality of image synthesis that focalizes the player’s shared decision-making with rendering algorithms, arguing that this dynamic in open-world westerns configures the player’s view of Indigenous bodies and objects. Subjective rendering techniques, particularly occlusion and simplification methods that remove geometry from view, reorganize gamic vision and limit how developers can complicate the in-built ways of seeing through the renderer. Occlusion then becomes both a principle of open-world design and a technical metaphor for examining how rendering structures exploration and possibility. This raises the stakes for gamic environments in westerns: both game and player determine how a shifting landscape that is so central to the conflict between settler and Indigenous figures materializes. Alternate approaches to these questions introduce interesting claims about the logic of settler digitality, a function of the algorithmic grammar of mainstream video games. Ultimately, renderers are cultural engines, not objective ones.
The Computer Games Journal, 2020
Though all video games require the player to observe the game state, the strategy genre relies on... more Though all video games require the player to observe the game state, the strategy genre relies on an experience of managing rule-based simulations that model real-world material systems. Designing for this experience produces a mode of interactive vision that structures gameplay as management: gamic monitoring. This article aims to develop a theory of gamic monitoring and explore its features through settler and Indigenous strategy, simulation, and resource management games. Games scholarship has yet to fully account for recent developments in Indigenous video games or how they relate to mainstream genres. Four comparative examples demonstrate how Indigenous games speak to settler-style gameplay, particularly its dynamics of monitoring and managing populations and resources. Due to their divergent frameworks for action, Indigenous strategy games intervene in mainstream genre conventions by shifting informatic play toward relational procedures of observation and decision-making. They express a paradigm of reciprocal interaction through how they mediate and critique codified game systems. Because Indigenous strategy games reconfigure resources and political engagement according to distinct models of managing the game state, they remain useful for further research in developing alternate models of strategy gameplay.
Screen Bodies, 2019
This article explores the digitality of Indigenous bodies within contemporary 3D video games by m... more This article explores the digitality of Indigenous bodies within contemporary 3D video games by mainstream and Indigenous developers. Its analysis relies on a critical examination of digital image synthesis via real-time graphics rendering, which algorithmically generates the visible world onscreen from 3D geometries by mapping textures, generating light and shadow, and simulating perceptual phenomena. At a time when physically based, unbiased rendering methods have made photorealistic styles and open-world structures common across AAA games in general, Indigenous game designers have instead employed simplified “low res” styles. Using bias as an interpretive model, this article unpacks how these designers critique mainstream rendering as a cultural-computational practice whose processes are encoded with cultural biases that frame the relation of player and screen body (avatar). The algorithmic production of digitally modeled bodies, as an essential but masked element of video games, offers a territory where Indigenous developers claim aesthetic presence in the medium.
Studies in American Indian Literatures, 2018
The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger, 2017
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2014
This essay explores three genres of Native storytelling and their echoes in contemporary literatu... more This essay explores three genres of Native storytelling and their echoes in contemporary literatures of removal. The Five “Civilized” Tribes—the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, and Cherokee Nations—have not only been shaped by the memory of removal but also by the process of telling it as history, of feeding an American appetite for tragedy, which maps their displacement on its material, cultural, and political axes. In the U.S. historical imagination, removal thus exceeds the bounds of event and condition to form an aesthetic within the larger arena of trauma discourse. By invoking each genre and its alter-species figures, Five Tribes authors enact a decolonization strategy that takes aim at this removal aesthetic as well as the colonial Eurowestern cartographic consciousness that undergirds it, which construes Indigenous people and non-human animals as lacking any sovereignty in a U.S. landscape. By articulating Native ecologies and place-making practices, authors unravel Eurowestern models and attend to what Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) calls “a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power” (p. 98) as reflected in popular representations of removal, specifically the Trail of Tears. At stake in contemporary stories for Five Tribes communities is a process of remapping home spaces under the historical and present condition of removal, a cartographic act that expresses Indigenous knowledge, thereby countering aesthetics of removal.
Beyond the Border: Tensions across the Forty-Ninth Parallel in the Great Plains and Prairies, 2013
Presentations & Lectures by Joshua D Miner
Native American & Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), 2020
Though a hallmark of the strategy genre, many video games require the player to monitor the game ... more Though a hallmark of the strategy genre, many video games require the player to monitor the game state, where rule-based systems function as proxies for real-world material systems. This feature of game design denotes a mode of interactive vision that structures gameplay as management—gamic monitoring. Indigenous strategy and simulation games bring this feature into focus, because the ideology of their mainstream counterparts emerges in how the game state is built on the status of “terra nullius,” a frontier for player expansion and extraction that expresses settler procedures in its very design, as Indigenous scholars from Jason Lewis to Jodi Byrd to Archer Pechawis have observed broadly of digital media.
This paper explores the politics of monitoring in Indigenous strategy, simulation, and resource management games. In particular, When Rivers Were Trails (2019), an Indigenous revision of the expansionist strategy game series Oregon Trail (1971-2011), and Arrival: Village Kasike (2012-present) offer interesting test cases for how Indigenous games speak to settler-style gameplay focalized through top-down monitoring and management. These games intervene in mainstream genre conventions to shift gameplay instead toward stewarding land through relational and tribally-specific procedures of observation and action. Their development teams critique genre structures that codified gameplay as bureaucratic management in the early 1980s, when gamic monitoring situated player as subject and digital environment (and Native) as object. Rather, Indigenous strategy and simulation games restructure resource management and political engagement by framing gamespace according to alternate ethics of interaction.
Native American & Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), 2019
The making-visible of lived experiences has been a central concern of digital media production by... more The making-visible of lived experiences has been a central concern of digital media production by Indigenous artists, while recent rights movements have called attention to the political disjuncture of Indigenous bodies and environment by settler institutions. Where these two energies meet, an array of activist media reaffirms that relationship by increasingly exploring its computational permutations—from the first #MMIW crowdmaps (2013) to the machinima animations of TimeTravellerTM (2009-2014) by Skawennati, which recreates scenes of Indigenous political resistance within a virtual simulation. Indigenous game designers have likewise used animation and digital modeling to explore the algorithmic relation between digital bodies and places.
This paper situates game-based media like Spirits of Spring (2014), Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) (2014), He Au Hou (A New World) (2017), and several games by Elizabeth LaPensee in a larger project of digital embodiment and place-making practices by Indigenous artists. Rendering Indigenous bodies and places algorithmic means exploring how they integrate and resist the structures of the settler digital platforms in which they are constructed and experienced. These practices of 3D modeling intervene in the aesthetic history of settler media, which has generated “low poly” (low polygon or resolution) Indigenous bodies rather than active, fully-dimensional bodies in digital environments. Synthesizing work on visual and representational sovereignty (Raheja, Hearne, Barclay, and others) with theoretical work on Indigenous digital design (Jason Lewis, Archer Pechawis), this paper argues that these games constitute Indigenous algorithmic responses to the logic of settler digitality—articulating Indigenous computational sovereignty as they adapt new digital forms.
Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), 2019
Society for Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS), 2019
Digital Frontiers, 2018
Indigenous rights movements have called attention to how the cultural disjuncture of women’s bodi... more Indigenous rights movements have called attention to how the cultural disjuncture of women’s bodies and environment perpetuates settler-colonial violence. An array of activist media reaffirms that relationship—Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ short video “Bloodland” (2011), the first #MMIW crowdmaps (2013), and the #AmINext photo campaign (2014) among them. Taking hold of digital platforms that facilitate new modes of expression, Indigenous game designers and artists have used animation to explore the computational relation between digital bodies and places, articulating the processes of Indigenous women’s embodied sovereignty.
This paper situates game-based media such as Achimostawinan Games’ Purity & Decay (2017-20) and Skawennati’s TimeTraveler (2014) and She Falls for Ages (2017) in a larger project of digital embodiment and place-making practices by Indigenous women. Rendering Indigenous bodies and places computational means exploring their interconnectedness at the level of procedurality: what relationship do the data points on the Missing Sisters digital crowdmap have, for example, to the Indigenous player avatars on AbTeC Island in Second Life? These animations intervene in the aesthetic history of patriarchal settler media, which has understood Indigenous women’s bodies as low poly—low-resolution bodies of narrative motif—but never as active bodies in digital space. These animations surface at the gap between Indigenous women’s stories and digital modeling, evoking Indigenous systems of embodiment in order to generate a digital presence against the narratives of the settler state.
Native American & Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), 2018
The recovery and making-visible onscreen of undocumented histories has been a central concern of ... more The recovery and making-visible onscreen of undocumented histories has been a central concern of contemporary Indigenous cinema and new media, where interactive platforms enable a unique engagement with experiences of colonial violence not recorded in the settler archive. Emerging from a preoccupation with documentary media that prefigured the relationship of Indigenous people to modern technologies, Native U.S./Canadian artists use animated documentary to restore dimensionality to experiences of the administrative violences of federal education and environmental dispossession.
This paper explores how these stop-motion shorts and video games reveal the mediating systems of administrative memory that first classify and then dispossess Indigenous people of their lived histories. These animated expressions surface at the perceived gap between craft arts and digital technologies, generating a distinct hybrid documentary aesthetic: Native game designers express this hybrid aesthetic in cinematic cutscenes and game environment, as in Arrival: Village Kasike (2008) and Never Alone (2014); meanwhile, Native animators Amanda Strong and Terril Calder employ stop-motion animation to reconstruct settler-colonial histories in their short films, such as Four Faces of the Moon (2016) and Snip (2016). Examining these media artifacts together, this paper argues that an emergent hybrid documentary aesthetic, focalized through the haptic dimensionality of a hand-crafted style, disrupts the administrative memory of settler-colonial media. The suture of Indigenous animation and documentary strikes a rhetorical stance by emphasizing what Steven Loft has called “communally shared history linked via mnemonic and transferable knowledge,” toward an ethical vision of Indigenous history situated outside the space of the settler archive.
Society for Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS), 2018
International Digital Media & Arts Association (iDMAa), 2017
This talk explores Native/First Nations digital games that operate as critical responses to mains... more This talk explores Native/First Nations digital games that operate as critical responses to mainstream game mechanics and neoliberal environmental policy. As a cultural medium whose systems are embedded with dominant ethics of interaction, mainstream videogames tend to reflect Eurowestern social and ecological values. Observing critical games’ ability to pose alternative values through gameplay, Native developers design game spaces that express Indigenous protocols for environmental interaction. For over a decade, as Indigenous lands and waters have been continually threatened by corporate resource extraction, these games have generated epistemological conflicts that disrupt settler society’s instrumentalization and commodification of environment. Instead, their gamespaces position players to experience alternate systems of interaction with land and environment. Digital games such as Arrival: Village Kasike (2008-17), Mawisowin (2012), Spirits of Spring (2014), Invaders (2015), and my forthcoming project, Esso S: Waste/land Management (2018), construe digital environments and gameplay as valuable symbolic sites for political occupation and reclamation. These games demonstrate how Indigenous epistemology, ecology, and social protocols may propose transformative spatial ethics. Finally, they deploy new procedures for mobilizing communities against state and corporate threats to Indigenous sovereignty.
Digital Humanities Forum. Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH), 2017
Native American & Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), 2017
This paper explores Native/First Nations digital games and other procedural media that operate as... more This paper explores Native/First Nations digital games and other procedural media that operate as critical responses to mainstream videogame mechanics and neocolonial environmental policy. As a cultural medium whose systems are embedded with dominant ethics of interaction, mainstream videogames tend to reflect Eurowestern social and ecological values. Synthesizing theories of procedural rhetoric and critical games’ ability to pose alternative values through gameplay with Indigenous media theory, this paper argues that Native/First Nations game designers develop new mechanics which express Indigenous protocols for environmental reclamation and, by extension, critique settler-bureaucratic conceptions of land and resource use. During a period when Indigenous lands and waters have been continually threatened by corporate resource extraction, from hydrofracking to the transport of bitumen, Native game mechanics generate epistemological conflicts that disrupt settler society’s instrumentalization and commodification of environment. Instead, these new game mechanics position players to experience alternate systems of interaction with land and environment. Digital games such as Spirits of Spring (2014), Qalupalik (2016), and Elizabeth LaPensée’s Invaders (2015), Honor Water (2016) and her forthcoming project Thunderbird Strike (2017) construe digital environments and gameplay as valuable symbolic sites for political occupation. They express how Indigenous epistemology, ecology, and social protocols may propose alternate systems gameplay. Finally, these games deploy new procedures for mobilizing communities and critiquing state and corporate threats to Indigenous sovereignty.
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Articles & Chapters by Joshua D Miner
Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW) movement over the last
decade reveals how institutional systems of organizing and
representing space present a key obstacle to the cause. Activists’
digital crowdmaps express an ethos of Indigenous data
sovereignty, or self-determination in data collection and
application, that interrogates settler data procedures relative to
gender violence. These tactical maps resonate with the circulation
of location-tagged photographs via social media campaigns like
#ImNotNext and #RedDressProject to similarly critique the
datasets of government agencies. This article conceptualizes both
media forms as informatic images that intervene in settler
cartographic practice as part of an ongoing decolonization of
digital mapping tools. Informatic images precondition the ways
that users interact with data through hypermediated visual
systems. Here, digital mapping and locative media practices
focalize a relationship between violence, biased data and space,
through various methods of layering, compositing and linking.
Settler computational structures undergird these affordances, yet
in a tactical context mapped images are reconstituted by user
interaction with an oppositional dataset to intervene in that
framework. Users’ emergent data of presence and absence plot a
distributed landscape of settler violence in accordance, instead,
with relational Indigenous knowledges.
Presentations & Lectures by Joshua D Miner
This paper explores the politics of monitoring in Indigenous strategy, simulation, and resource management games. In particular, When Rivers Were Trails (2019), an Indigenous revision of the expansionist strategy game series Oregon Trail (1971-2011), and Arrival: Village Kasike (2012-present) offer interesting test cases for how Indigenous games speak to settler-style gameplay focalized through top-down monitoring and management. These games intervene in mainstream genre conventions to shift gameplay instead toward stewarding land through relational and tribally-specific procedures of observation and action. Their development teams critique genre structures that codified gameplay as bureaucratic management in the early 1980s, when gamic monitoring situated player as subject and digital environment (and Native) as object. Rather, Indigenous strategy and simulation games restructure resource management and political engagement by framing gamespace according to alternate ethics of interaction.
This paper situates game-based media like Spirits of Spring (2014), Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) (2014), He Au Hou (A New World) (2017), and several games by Elizabeth LaPensee in a larger project of digital embodiment and place-making practices by Indigenous artists. Rendering Indigenous bodies and places algorithmic means exploring how they integrate and resist the structures of the settler digital platforms in which they are constructed and experienced. These practices of 3D modeling intervene in the aesthetic history of settler media, which has generated “low poly” (low polygon or resolution) Indigenous bodies rather than active, fully-dimensional bodies in digital environments. Synthesizing work on visual and representational sovereignty (Raheja, Hearne, Barclay, and others) with theoretical work on Indigenous digital design (Jason Lewis, Archer Pechawis), this paper argues that these games constitute Indigenous algorithmic responses to the logic of settler digitality—articulating Indigenous computational sovereignty as they adapt new digital forms.
This paper situates game-based media such as Achimostawinan Games’ Purity & Decay (2017-20) and Skawennati’s TimeTraveler (2014) and She Falls for Ages (2017) in a larger project of digital embodiment and place-making practices by Indigenous women. Rendering Indigenous bodies and places computational means exploring their interconnectedness at the level of procedurality: what relationship do the data points on the Missing Sisters digital crowdmap have, for example, to the Indigenous player avatars on AbTeC Island in Second Life? These animations intervene in the aesthetic history of patriarchal settler media, which has understood Indigenous women’s bodies as low poly—low-resolution bodies of narrative motif—but never as active bodies in digital space. These animations surface at the gap between Indigenous women’s stories and digital modeling, evoking Indigenous systems of embodiment in order to generate a digital presence against the narratives of the settler state.
This paper explores how these stop-motion shorts and video games reveal the mediating systems of administrative memory that first classify and then dispossess Indigenous people of their lived histories. These animated expressions surface at the perceived gap between craft arts and digital technologies, generating a distinct hybrid documentary aesthetic: Native game designers express this hybrid aesthetic in cinematic cutscenes and game environment, as in Arrival: Village Kasike (2008) and Never Alone (2014); meanwhile, Native animators Amanda Strong and Terril Calder employ stop-motion animation to reconstruct settler-colonial histories in their short films, such as Four Faces of the Moon (2016) and Snip (2016). Examining these media artifacts together, this paper argues that an emergent hybrid documentary aesthetic, focalized through the haptic dimensionality of a hand-crafted style, disrupts the administrative memory of settler-colonial media. The suture of Indigenous animation and documentary strikes a rhetorical stance by emphasizing what Steven Loft has called “communally shared history linked via mnemonic and transferable knowledge,” toward an ethical vision of Indigenous history situated outside the space of the settler archive.
Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW) movement over the last
decade reveals how institutional systems of organizing and
representing space present a key obstacle to the cause. Activists’
digital crowdmaps express an ethos of Indigenous data
sovereignty, or self-determination in data collection and
application, that interrogates settler data procedures relative to
gender violence. These tactical maps resonate with the circulation
of location-tagged photographs via social media campaigns like
#ImNotNext and #RedDressProject to similarly critique the
datasets of government agencies. This article conceptualizes both
media forms as informatic images that intervene in settler
cartographic practice as part of an ongoing decolonization of
digital mapping tools. Informatic images precondition the ways
that users interact with data through hypermediated visual
systems. Here, digital mapping and locative media practices
focalize a relationship between violence, biased data and space,
through various methods of layering, compositing and linking.
Settler computational structures undergird these affordances, yet
in a tactical context mapped images are reconstituted by user
interaction with an oppositional dataset to intervene in that
framework. Users’ emergent data of presence and absence plot a
distributed landscape of settler violence in accordance, instead,
with relational Indigenous knowledges.
This paper explores the politics of monitoring in Indigenous strategy, simulation, and resource management games. In particular, When Rivers Were Trails (2019), an Indigenous revision of the expansionist strategy game series Oregon Trail (1971-2011), and Arrival: Village Kasike (2012-present) offer interesting test cases for how Indigenous games speak to settler-style gameplay focalized through top-down monitoring and management. These games intervene in mainstream genre conventions to shift gameplay instead toward stewarding land through relational and tribally-specific procedures of observation and action. Their development teams critique genre structures that codified gameplay as bureaucratic management in the early 1980s, when gamic monitoring situated player as subject and digital environment (and Native) as object. Rather, Indigenous strategy and simulation games restructure resource management and political engagement by framing gamespace according to alternate ethics of interaction.
This paper situates game-based media like Spirits of Spring (2014), Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) (2014), He Au Hou (A New World) (2017), and several games by Elizabeth LaPensee in a larger project of digital embodiment and place-making practices by Indigenous artists. Rendering Indigenous bodies and places algorithmic means exploring how they integrate and resist the structures of the settler digital platforms in which they are constructed and experienced. These practices of 3D modeling intervene in the aesthetic history of settler media, which has generated “low poly” (low polygon or resolution) Indigenous bodies rather than active, fully-dimensional bodies in digital environments. Synthesizing work on visual and representational sovereignty (Raheja, Hearne, Barclay, and others) with theoretical work on Indigenous digital design (Jason Lewis, Archer Pechawis), this paper argues that these games constitute Indigenous algorithmic responses to the logic of settler digitality—articulating Indigenous computational sovereignty as they adapt new digital forms.
This paper situates game-based media such as Achimostawinan Games’ Purity & Decay (2017-20) and Skawennati’s TimeTraveler (2014) and She Falls for Ages (2017) in a larger project of digital embodiment and place-making practices by Indigenous women. Rendering Indigenous bodies and places computational means exploring their interconnectedness at the level of procedurality: what relationship do the data points on the Missing Sisters digital crowdmap have, for example, to the Indigenous player avatars on AbTeC Island in Second Life? These animations intervene in the aesthetic history of patriarchal settler media, which has understood Indigenous women’s bodies as low poly—low-resolution bodies of narrative motif—but never as active bodies in digital space. These animations surface at the gap between Indigenous women’s stories and digital modeling, evoking Indigenous systems of embodiment in order to generate a digital presence against the narratives of the settler state.
This paper explores how these stop-motion shorts and video games reveal the mediating systems of administrative memory that first classify and then dispossess Indigenous people of their lived histories. These animated expressions surface at the perceived gap between craft arts and digital technologies, generating a distinct hybrid documentary aesthetic: Native game designers express this hybrid aesthetic in cinematic cutscenes and game environment, as in Arrival: Village Kasike (2008) and Never Alone (2014); meanwhile, Native animators Amanda Strong and Terril Calder employ stop-motion animation to reconstruct settler-colonial histories in their short films, such as Four Faces of the Moon (2016) and Snip (2016). Examining these media artifacts together, this paper argues that an emergent hybrid documentary aesthetic, focalized through the haptic dimensionality of a hand-crafted style, disrupts the administrative memory of settler-colonial media. The suture of Indigenous animation and documentary strikes a rhetorical stance by emphasizing what Steven Loft has called “communally shared history linked via mnemonic and transferable knowledge,” toward an ethical vision of Indigenous history situated outside the space of the settler archive.
Native writers have long battled bureaucracy but only in the twentieth century began to interrogate its underlying structures, discourses and procedures. Early texts about Indian education, such as Zitakala-Sa’s “The School Days of an Indian Girl” (1921) opened the door for late twentieth-century explorations that sought to deconstruct bureaucratic procedure, among them “Lullaby,” from Leslie Silko’s Storyteller (1981). Authors attend to the system’s profound effect on Native bodies and spaces, yet language remains a unifying entry point, as archetypically silent protagonists signify a concern for how Native people have found themselves interpellated by education programs. In this context, the truant or runaway figure expresses a transformative unmanageability. This dynamic binds seemingly disparate stories of boarding schools, incarceration, and reservations, which interrogate public policies that seek to contain and then convert the “Indian.” Containment discourse embedded in these policies produces a counter-rhetoric of escape in contemporary Native literatures, texts which resonate with current activist movements seeking to recover boarding school histories. This rhetoric focalizes in the oppositional relation between the agency and the truant. Works by Gerald Vizenor and Gordon Henry offer a model of the truant’s activist expression of unmanageability; N. Scott Momaday’s stage play The Indolent Boys and stories by Sherman Alexie offer more complete visions of the figure.
Louise Erdrich’s 2012 award-winning novel, The Round House, operates in this way. Inspired by an Amnesty International report, its plot and themes turn upon the law, with “jurisdiction” as the fulcrum: the wife of a tribal judge is sexually assaulted at a ceremonial location precisely because an “unfair maze of land title law” has created a jurisdictional dead zone where the act of violence may not be prosecuted. As Erdrich wrote for the New York Times in an op-ed titled “Rape on the Reservation,” the colonial forces that created this dead zone have manifested new patterns of violence, even recreational rape—likewise, each act of sexual, domestic, and revolutionary violence in The Round House would not exist otherwise. Stephen Jones’s Ledfeather (2008) similarly expresses how unjust reservation law and actions by government officials in the nineteenth century live on in present bureaucracy, damaging the lives of Blackfeet residents. Mass starvation, alcoholism, and suicide reverberate through time as consequences of bureaucratic violence. Furthermore, both The Round House and Ledfeather are set in a U.S.–Canada border region rife with yet more jurisdictional contradiction and complexity.
Both authors address the issue of justice. In Ledfeather, child suicide transforms into a form of violence against the self that reflects neither existential crisis nor depression; instead its misguided violence serves to correct an imbalance caused by bureaucratic abuses. The Round House illustrates how unique places like the eponymous “round house” also produce new healing practices—particularly for a new generation (as its narrator and many of the main characters are children). Representing bureaucratic processes allows Native authors to not only critique Eurowestern imperialism through its structures and modes of organizing space, but also to aesthetically imagine new routes toward balance and justice for Native people.
I rely on Vizenor’s playful “postindian” critical work and the Two-Spirit criticism of Cherokee scholar Qwo-Li Driskill, to explore literary conversions of heteronormativity. For Driskill, the Two-Spirit concept—niizh manitoag in Anishinaabemowin—not only denotes “numerous tribal traditions and social categories of gender outside dominant European binaries,” but has the narrative power to disrupt such binaries (“Doubleweaving” 72). I will unpack three contemporary novels to explore the deployment of transsexualism as a strategy toward cultural sovereignty: Erdrich’s Plague of Doves, Vizenor’s Hotline Healers, and King’s Truth and Bright Water. Each problematizes the longstanding image of the transgressive “Indian” by rewriting characters into over-interstitial states, expanding the “border” so that transgression takes on new meaning—everything is or is on the border, and the most effective tool for social change is mischief. These authors argue that what Vizenor calls an “erotic conversion” must take place, a transformative trespass which will make permeable the border that still inhibits mutual understanding between present-day indigenous and Euroamerican cultures.