Native American Woman's Phenomenological Experience of Space and Place in Erdrich's Tracks

This study discusses Native American woman's experience of existential outsideness, which is caused by the Euro-American legislative act as represented by Louise Erdrich in her novel Tracks. This research analyzes the role of the Dawes Act of 1887 in triggering the experience of existential outsideness among the Native Americans in general and Native American women in particular. Through Edward Casey Ralph's phenomenological perspective on the notion of spatiality, the study reinterprets the representation of space and place in Louise Erdrich's Tracks. The study offers a spatial reading of a Native American woman's life to explicate how she confronts the issues related to the confiscation of her ancestral lands that trigger her experience of existential outsideness to her land. The study concludes that Euro-American policies of acculturation and assimilation thwarted spatioexistential experiences of Native American women.

Conflict at Kewa and Isleta Pueblos

This chapter opens with detailed analysis of deculturation policy during the Spanish, Mexican, and American governance of New Mexico and the Pueblos. In the more recent history it includes discussion of the Code of Indian Offenses, the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act), the Carlisle Indian School, the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (Hiawatha Asylum), and the evolving policies of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. These introductory remarks are followed by analyses of a 1935–1940 conflict at Santo Domingo (Kewa) Pueblo, when Archbishop Rudolph Gerken attempted to change traditional practice of Catholicism and to house a resident priest and sisters at Santo Domingo; and of a conflict at Isleta Pueblo that culminated when Monsignor Frederick Stadtmueller was removed in handcuffs by the pueblo governor in 1965. The Native American ministry of the archdiocese and native resistance to dogma are also considered more generally. Visiting information for Kewa and Isleta is included.

WHAT WE DON'T SEE WHEN WE SEE COPYRIGHT AS PROPERTY

For all of the rhetoric about the central place of authors in the copyright scheme, our copyright laws in fact give them little power and less money. Intermediaries own the copyrights, and are able to structure licenses so as to maximise their own revenue while shrinking their pay-outs to authors. Copyright scholars have tended to treat this point superficially, because – as lawyers – we take for granted that copyrights are property; property rights are freely alienable; and the grantee of a property right stands in the shoes of the original holder. I compare the 1710 Statute of Anne, which created statutory copyrights and consolidated them in the hands of publishers and printers, with the 1887 Dawes Act, which served a crucial function in the American divestment of Indian land. I draw from the stories of the two laws the same moral: Constituting something as a freely alienable property right will almost always lead to results mirroring or exacerbating disparities in wealth and bargaining power. The legal dogma surrounding property rights makes it easy for us not to notice.

Plotting Maidens and Traitors

This chapter maps sympathy’s place in the emplotment of what became known as the “New Southwest” after the U.S.–Mexican War. The chapter reads sympathy in the work of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, who opposed U.S. settlers plotting out the American West. In Life Among the Piutes, Hopkins countered the proposals that would eventually become the Dawes Act of 1887, which prescribed allotment (parceling land for tribesmembers’ individual ownership) and severalty (stripping Native Americans of tribal citizenship). She guides Anglo readers in understanding “love thy neighbor as thyself” as a principle best expressed from far away. After Gwin’s Land Law of 1851, de Burton lost a fortune defending her family’s rancho against U.S. squatters. In The Squatter and the Don, she inverts the stock character of the “sad” Mexicano to associate U.S. Americans with tears and grief through the figures of the white railroad baron, corrupt lawyer, and settler citizen.