1. Rereading General Land Office Archives: Louise Erdrich's Four Souls and Archival Sovereignty.
- Author
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TURNER, ALISON
- Subjects
- *
OJIBWA (North American people) , *IMPERIALISM , *BUREAUCRACY - Abstract
The work of activists, researchers, and archivists to decolonize collections of documents that record indigenous land dispossession is complex and ongoing, not so unlike the process of land dispossession itself. The process of digitizing colonialist land records raises questions of privacy and access -- to whom are these records accessible, and to whom should their access be denied -- as much as questions about the categories under which records are archived. A sample of three late nineteenth-century colonialist land records belonging to Chippewa community members, now archived by the General Land Office (GLO) and available online, shows that the people who were allotted land do not mark the documents, and that the documents are cluttered with addendums and marginalia handwritten by colonialist bureaucrats. This article shows how Louise Erdrich's Matchimanito saga, particularly the novel Four Souls, makes visible new ways of interpreting these nonfictional land records with a lens of what Emily Lederman calls "archival sovereignty." Tracing the fictional land deed of one of the novel's protagonists, Fleur Pillager, throughout her ongoing responses to colonialist land dispossession, the article identifies three literary devices that contribute to a fictional world of archival sovereignty: multiple and changing metaphors to describe colonialist bureaucracy, which is explored as a form of motion; Fleur's persistence and decision-making that requires colonialist response, actions that shape the contents of the land record and are thus a form of co-authorship of that record; and a narrative world that disregards the bureaucratically imposed power of possessing land records, emphasizing instead the ongoing story that such records represent. The article shows how these literary devices make it possible to reread nonfictional land records with a lens that makes visible indigenous decision-making, stories, and sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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