Join author Sabine N. Meyer as she presents her new book “Native Removal Writing: Narratives of Peoplehood, Politics, and Law” which explores literature and questions of Indigenous identity.
Registration in advance is required to attend. Register here. Lecture organized by the Centre for Global Studies as part of the Property and Dispossession Speakers Series hosted by UVic’s Property Rights & Society Discussion Group.
Indian removal, the nineteenth-century policy of expelling Native peoples from their land, has generated a plethora of Native American writings that negotiate forms of belonging–the identities of Native collectives, their proprietary relationships, and their most intimate relations among one another. By analyzing these writings in light of domestic settler colonial, international, and tribal law, Sabine N. Meyer reveals their coherence as a distinct genre of Native literature that has played a significant role in negotiating Indigenous identity. Critically engaging with Native Removal writings across the centuries, Meyer’s work shows how these texts need to be viewed as articulations of Native identity that respond to immediate political concerns and that take up the question of how Native peoples can define and assert their own social, cultural, and legal-political forms of living, being, and belonging within the settler colonial order. Placing novels in conversation with nonfiction writings, “Native Removal Writing” ranges from texts produced in response to the legal and political struggle over Cherokee Removal in the late 1820s and 1830s, to works written by African-Native writers dealing with the freedmen disenrollment crisis, to contemporary speculative fiction that links the appropriation of Native intangible property (culture) with the earlier dispossession of their real property (land). “Native Removal Writing” thus testifies to both the ongoing power of Native Removal writing and its significance as a critical practice of resistance.
