Indian agencies: Native poetics of resistance in a bureaucratic landscape【翻译】

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To the Department of English at the University of Iowa, for granting me the freedom to
make a path through the program that best suited me as a growing scholar.
To the General Education Literature Program and the other young teachers with whom I
shaped my personal pedagogy, gaining experience and humility along the way.
To my fellow Iowa graduate scholars: your friendship has meant everything to me.
To Miriam Thaggert, for introducing me to graduate school so long ago and sparking my
interest in the relationship between technology, media, and literatures of difference.
To Loren Glass, for impressing upon me your invaluable sociological perspective and for
your support of students during your time as Director of Graduate Studies and beyond.
To Phillip Round, for being a model scholar whom I have from the beginning strived to
emulate. I won’t forget that seven-hour drive to my first American Indian Studies conference in
Detroit, nor your support after I rambled through my presentation.
To Erica Prussing, for your irreplaceable interdisciplinary guidance during my growth
into a scholar of Indigenous studies, and for supporting my participation as an elder graduate
student in the American Indian and Native Studies Program.
To my thesis director, Linda Bolton: I am a better scholar and person for your presence. I
stand in better relation to the world. Through all of my trials, you stood behind me as instructor,
editor, adviser, mentor, master chef, and friend. I will always remember our time working across
the table from one another. I have surely chosen my teachers wisely…
And to my partner and family, I could not have survived without you. You smiled and
laughed and cooked when I couldn’t, unraveled my stress, and still had the energy to stand with
me. You know who you are.
v
ABSTRACT
This dissertation offers a transdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between settlercolonial
bureaucracy and Native artistic production. Employing methodologies from literary,
media and rhetorical studies, public health and organizational studies, I argue that the settler
compulsion to manage Native people, formalized in the bureaucratic model, precipitated the
twentieth-century development of a Native poetics of resistance. A managerial presence has
always permeated U.S.–Native relations, as bureaucrats regulated Native activity, maintained
records, instructed in Anglo-Western values and habits, and reported on Native progress toward
assimilation. Bureaucratic parlance contained a crucial contradiction: the “Indian agency” and
“Indian agent” originated at the start of—and for the purpose of—the erosion of Indigenous
agency. I investigate how authors exploit these as tropes in deconstructing Native administrative
subjectivity. Two faces of this presence emerge: the agent, instrument of surveillance and
managerial practice; and the agency, management’s projection in space, creating a bureaucratic
landscape that impairs Native health. Within all representations of bureaucracy linger traces of
the unmanageable, an Indigenous fugitive presence that eludes classification, regulation, and
narratives of control. I analyze these tropes in four realms of settler-bureaucratic practice, where
a transmedia poetics develops within the field of Native arts that engage with administrative
systems and discourses. I begin with expressions of therapeutic insobriety that defy Anglo-
Western models of addiction and treatment; in chapter two, I delineate a wiindigoo poetics that
critiques the management of Native foodways. A poetics of truancy surfaces in chapter three to
express a dynamic of escape from representational closure by settler education. I argue finally
that, in stories of sexual violence against Native women, there arises a poetics that privileges
experiences of violence over legalist records that efface those experiences.
vi
PUBLIC ABSTRACT
During the twentieth century, Native and First Nations writers and artists working across
several media developed aesthetic strategies for critiquing U.S. and Canadian bureaucracy and
their effects on Native life. Bureaucratic institutions compulsively managed Native people by
way surveillance and management practices designed to instruct in Anglo-Western values and
habits and report on Native progress toward assimilation. I argue that administrative language
captured an important contradiction: the “Indian agency” and “Indian agent” originated for the
purpose of limiting the self-determination of Native people. I investigate how authors use these
two figures in stories of bureaucracy: the agent, who performs surveillance and management; and
the agency, management’s manifestation in space, creating a bureaucratic landscape that impairs
Native health. Within all representations of bureaucracy linger traces of the unmanageable, a
fugitive presence that eludes classification, regulation, and narratives of control. I analyze these
figures as they appear in Native arts that engage with four areas of administrative practice and
discourse. I begin by considering stories of Native insobriety that defy Anglo-Western models of
addiction and treatment; in chapter two, I examine stories that critique the U.S. and Canadian
management of Native food cultures. In chapter three, I illustrate how stories express a dynamic
of escape from the narratives of federal Indian boarding schools. I argue finally that, in stories of
sexual violence against Native women, authors privilege experiences of violence over legalist
definitions that erase those experiences. My project aims to situate these within a larger field of
Native advocacy strategies.

原文地址：

http://www.hongfu951.info/file/resource-detail.do?id=5f4c380e-7c7b-492b-8a9a-e05e1a50e232