Document Type

Thesis

Degree

Master of Arts (MA)

Major/Program

English

First Advisor's Name

Dr. Anne Margaret Castro

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Dr. Michaela Moura-Koçoğlu

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Third Advisor's Name

Dr. Ana G Luszczynska

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Fourth Advisor's Name

Dr. Nathaniel Cadle

Fourth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Keywords

Native American, queer, performance, Indigeneity, sovereignty, Louise Erdrich, memory

Date of Defense

3-27-2023

Abstract

Analyzing Louise Erdrich’s novels The Night Watchman and Love Medicine by synthesizing Indigenous Studies, Performance Studies, and Queer Studies, this paper argues that sovereign Indigenous performances may at times resist and reify settler colonial presumptions, lending them unfortunate legitimacy and furthering colonial projects such as assimilation. At the same time, Native American literature resists such projects by constructing a model for a narrativized, phantasmic Indigenous body incapable of being assimilated. Indigeneity in Erdrich’s novels is not localized in the materially affected Indigenous body but is articulated with it. Language, instead, (re)constructs Indigeneity by asserting the ability to name oneself. To name and define means to declaratively perform Indigeneity in a reciprocal, harmonious relationship with land. Protecting land through this relationship extends Indigenous possibility beyond settler epistemologies and reclaims forcibly forgotten Indigenous histories and identifications. In remembering these grounded histories, Erdrich’s novels reclaim an Indigenous future.

Identifier

FIDC011069

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