Narrative Cartographies of Native American Resurgence:

Women’s Self-Constructions, Transmotion, and the Decolonization of Spatial Inquiry

Abstract

Drawing on a long-standing history of leadership within their communities, Native American women have become increasingly prominent in the movement for Indigenous resurgence including, but not limited to, their re-articulation of the connection with land. In this paper, I discuss Native American women’s literary cartographies as a strategy towards spatial decolonization, in line with Native American resurgence, a project that aligns with what Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) refers to as a shift from being reviewed as research objects to becoming their own researchers. In their self-narratives, Indigenous authors connect such mapping practices to exploring overlying stories—familial, ancestral, historical, and spiritual—that mark autobiographical moments that “take place.” Thematically speaking, the motif of the journey and constant movement can be read as “an attempt to counter, even symbolically reverse, earlier historical displacement of the authors’ respective cultural groups” (Sarkowsky 2020). This paper provides a glimpse into alternative ways to map Indigenous embodied experiences in 21st-century memoirs by Native American female authors—Harjo, Jensen, Elliott, Washuta, and Grover—who adopt renewed representational strategies, utilizing various forms of literary mapping techniques, re-representing their own experiences of land through a complex geography of ties to places, movement, and mobility in textual contexts. Grounding the article in Indigenous feminist place-based and land-based readings that center Indigenous women’s voices at the forefront of struggles for self-determination and sovereignty, and in Vizenor’s oft-quoted notions of survivance and transmotion, I argue that the interplay between movement and rootedness is crucial in these life storiers’ engagement with conceptions of land and place that grapple with the American understanding of territoriality. Women’s life writings serve as oppositional mappings of Western-centered cartographies, thus providing a re-righting and rewriting of sovereign stories. The findings of this analysis hope to enrich the discussion of the decolonization of spatial inquiry and, by extension, Indigenous resurgence.