Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd sees the
necessity of moving beyond a colonial framework in talking about Indigenous
futures. By drawing upon Southeastern Indian concepts that focus on the balance
between Upper and Lower Worlds, she examines how the U.S. has used its history
with Indians to inform its current global policies. In her new book, The Transit of
Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (UMN Press
2011), Byrd reimagines a future where Indigenous peoples have agency on their
own lands and on their own terms. Here, Byrd answers questions about what
brought her to this area of research as well as the conversations and
interventions she hopes it will provoke.
First of all, what inspired the intellectual
path that led you to write this book? Who were your primary influences?
There were so many minds that
influenced, shaped, and inspired the book. My dissertation advisors at
Iowa—Professors Mary Lou Emery and Anne Donadey—helped me to frame my initial
inquiry as I struggled to articulate the critical deployment of cacophony as an
intervention to how postcolonial theory has addressed (or not) the context of
American Indians. Mary Lou Emery introduced me to the writings of Caribbean
author Wilson Harris. His work in developing a Caribbean philosophy that
addresses Indigenous peoples is in many ways the ethical center of my book.
LeAnne Howe’s work was essential to the project and her short story, “Chaos of
Angels,” delineates for me the Southeastern cultural aesthetic of haksuba
and helps define the contest between Upper and Lower Worlds that affects and
manifests in this world as chaos. In the book, I build on Howe’s story to
define haksuba as cacophony as a way to articulate the processes that
mask the colonization of American Indians within the discourses of race and
racism. From there, I’d have to say Noenoe Silva, Taiaiake Alfred, Jeff
Corntassel, and Hokulani Aikau really helped me understand the significance of
grounding critical theory first through the framework of Indigenous
philosophies. Finally, Māori poet Robert Sullivan gave a reading during an
intensive two-week Indigenous governance course I co-taught in Hawai‘i. His
poetry on Captain Cook and the transit of Venus was lyrically beautiful and the
story stuck with me and became the primary touchstone for Transit of Empire.
What are some of the main
interventions you hope to make with this book?
My primary hope for the book is that
it might help catalyze discussions about the very real and ongoing colonial
occupation of American Indian and Indigenous lands. Liberal settler societies
are using multiculturalism and the investment in the nation-state to
effectively disavow the colonization that made the liberal nation-state
possible in the first place. Everyone—every diasporic migrant, every immigrant,
every person forced into the new world—is affected by the colonization of
American Indians. It is not part of some long dead past that can now be
adjudicated by a more equal sharing of resources and the commons. My book,
then, is hoping to demonstrate the strength of Indigenous critical theory, and
in each chapter I try to address—and pull into tension—the broader
interdisciplinary concerns that discourses of race and colonization engender
within critical theory in the hopes that by disaggregating them slightly, it is
possible to highlight the logics that have kept the colonization of Indigenous
peoples deferred within theories addressing colonialism and its legacies.
In the introduction to the book, you
discuss the conflation of colonization and racialization as historical
processes. Could you explain how that trend has played out and why it’s
problematic?
One of the concerns in the book is
that within twentieth- and twenty-first century articulations of liberal
democracy, race has become the primary site of intervention and critical
engagement within the U.S. academy. Racialization is assumed to be a process of
colonization within the United States. And certainly, analyzing the processes
of racialization—the socially constructed categories of differentiation that
justify the subordination of whole groups of people—goes a long way in
addressing the historical and contemporary violences the United States
perpetuates at home and abroad. But racialization alone cannot always unpack
the historical impact of colonization upon Indigenous nations and lands. I
argue in the book that theories we deploy to understand race and internal
colonization often replicate colonialist discourses that serve to render American
Indians as U.S. ethnic minorities rather than as citizens of colonized nations.
By disaggregating the two terms slightly and focusing on the material
distinctions between the two historical processes, my book demonstrates—in case
studies that include a return to postcolonial discussions of Caliban, the
Cherokee Nation’s decision to disenfranchise Cherokee Freedmen, and the
internment of Japanese Americans during World War II—how the colonization of
American Indians structurally informs the ways in which race is understood and
constituted within the United States.
What do you mean when you say that
the U.S. uses Indianness to propagate its empire?
In the book, I discuss how the
Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as it has been interpreted by Chief Justice
John Marshall, created the categories “foreign nation,” “several states,” and
“Indian tribes.” In the rulings that led up to the Cherokee removal, Marshall
argued that the founding fathers categorically separated Indian tribes from
foreign nations, a reading of that clause which he then used to assert that
Indian nations were somehow “domestic dependent nations.” However, the Commerce
Clause is also describing relational powers Congress has: “to regulate Commerce
with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian
tribes.” The trick here is in the prepositions—with and among—that have been
overshadowed by the three categories created by the Clause. Because Congress
has the same relationship with foreign Nations and with Indian Tribes that
differs from the one it has among the several States, I argue in the book, the
U.S. is able to enact empire through a deployment of its colonial policies at
the site of those relational powers. One of the most egregious examples of how
the legal category of “Indian tribe” is being used to consolidate U.S.
territorial holdings at the expense of Indigenous peoples comes in the form of
the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act and the debates that have
surrounded the various attempts to pass it into law at the national level. In
one of the hearings on the possible legislation, Senator Inouye declared that
Hawaiians are Indians under the Commerce Clause. “The framers of the
constitution,” he asserts, “did not import a meaning to those terms as a limitation
upon the authority of Congress, but as descriptions of the Native people who
occupied and possessed the lands that were later to become the United States.”
It’s a stunning sentence and all done under the rubric of including the
Hawaiian Kingdom as a foreign nation into the policies that have managed the
colonization of American Indians.
Could you talk about how you define
transit for the purposes of the book and why you think it’s an important frame
in moving discussions beyond colonial discourse?
The work of Indigenous critical
theory is, in part, to discuss the colonialist discourses that have affected
Indigenous peoples and their lands. My use of transit doesn’t necessarily move
us beyond colonial discourse as much as it attempts to diagnose its logics and
logical fallacies. Transit is a reference in the book to many things, though I
primarily use it to discuss how U.S. empire moves along the sightlines of
Indians and the discourses of Indianness to manifest its control of territory
and space. The transit I use here also comes from a reference to the transit of
Venus, a rare astronomical event that happens twice every one hundred and
twenty years. The 1761 and 1769 transits sent hundreds of European scientists
and explorers to every corner of the globe and the simultaneous observation of
the planet Venus as it made its way across the face of the sun served to
inaugurate a notion of the planetary among those European observers. And as
Captain Cook made his way to Tahiti and Hawai‘i to observe these events—and
claim lands for Britain—he traveled through Pacific islands filled with peoples
he called Indians. As a metaphor for how the U.S. uses discourses of Indianness
to enact empire, a concept like transit captures the movement, oscillation, and
changes that occur as “Indian” is stretched to include more and more contexts.
Interestingly, the next transit of Venus will occur during the Native American
and Indigenous Studies Association Meeting held this summer at the Mohegan Sun.
The ideal viewing locations for the full duration of the 2012 transit include
most of the Pacific Islands in an eerily exact parallel to the 1769 transit
that sent Cook into the Pacific over 250 years ago. Reports are that the
transit will be viewable from New England around sunset on June 5, and then
only briefly.
You recently attended the Chickasaw
annual meeting. What was your experience bringing the book back to your home
community and how was it received there?
It was an incredible opportunity and experience to be part
of the Chickasaw Annual Meeting as a Chickasaw author. While admittedly my book
is rather dense and is often engaged in theoretical debates ranging from a
critique of Gilles Deleuze to an analysis of how Indians are rendered homo
sacer within legal rulings that then serve as precedence for the U.S. war
on terror, what was so gratifying about taking my book back to my home
community was just how proud the nation was of the ways in which all of us
Chickasaws work to preserve our intellectual, artistic, and governance
traditions. One of the highlights for me on the trip was to see all the work
Amanda Cobb-Greetham has done to create the Chickasaw
Cultural Center as a research center for scholars. Between that
and the Chickasaw
Press that Amanda runs, the Chickasaw Nation has an unparalleled
commitment to developing and promoting the intellectual and cultural lives of
the Chickasaw people. The second highlight for me from that trip was just
sitting in the tent next to the Tishomingo capitol building and getting to meet
and talk with people in the Nation. I had the opportunity to share stories with
people who remember my family and Governor Byrd’s role in the Chickasaw
government in the 1890s. I’m grateful to everyone who made my participation in
the annual meeting possible this year.
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