Forgotten/Remembered
The words Faith Spotted Eagle used to conclude her testimony at the public meeting on the Keystone XL pipeline bear repeating. “We do believe that Mother Nature, Iná Makȟá [‘Mother Earth’], is speaking,” she told the panel of government officials. “And I think, true to what my grandmother said, nuŋȟčháŋ means wooden ears. And I would urge the Department of State to listen.” The symbol of ears has a central place in Lakota diplomacy. “References to ears abound in the written proceedings of treaty councils,” anthropologist Raymond DeMallie explains. “Semantically, it appears that the piercing, opening, or mere acknowledgment of possessing ears expressed a willingness to listen to and accept a significant message.” To have “no ears” meant the inverse—to be hard of hearing or deaf, to be unwilling to listen or not to understand. When Spotted Eagle used the phrase “wooden ears,” just as when she asserted sovereignty by talking the language of the larger world, she participated in a Lakota political tradition. She conveyed the same message her ancestors had in 1851 and again in 1868—and in much the same way. The only thing that changed was the context in which she took politically purposeful action.1
All of the documents in this volume, like the one featuring Faith Spotted Eagle, underscore how crucial it is to understand politics and protest in Native America since 1887 as part of the continuing encounters between Natives and newcomers. An awareness of this tradition’s history calls into question the old (and all too tenacious) narrative of declension, defeat, and disappearance fashioned by the memory makers of colonies and settler states. It reminds us that, in creating national narratives to substantiate the dispossession of indigenous peoples, they “emplotted” history “in particular ways.” Political scientist Benedict Anderson refers to the end result of writing one people into history while simultaneously writing others out as “the remembered/forgotten.”2
I would like to think of Say We Are Nations, like so much of the exciting scholarship being produced in American Indian and indigenous studies, as its antithesis—as the “forgotten/remembered.”3 Taken as a whole, the documents respond to the presumption of indigenous incorporation and disappearance with a collective “not so fast.” They, like Vine Deloria Jr. in 1970, seize control of the authorial voice by saying, “We talk, you listen.” That is not to suggest, however, that saying we are nations and talking the language of the larger world are simple propositions. They are not. The fifty-five examples I have offered provide a sense of breadth, depth, complexity, contingency, continuity, and even contradiction—but they are not by any means quintessential or exhaustive. In fact, they barely scratch the surface. So, I offer this collection as a beginning again, rather than an end, to an intellectual journey—as an invitation to take part in the excavation of the ideas that make Native politics and protest since 1887 so fascinating. I can’t tell you what you’ll find, but I am confident that it will be worth the effort.4