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13 - Native Women’s Writing and Law

from Part II - Assimilation and Modernity (1879–1967)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2020

By
Beth H. Piatote
Edited by
Melanie Benson Taylor
Melanie Benson Taylor
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
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Summary

From the eighteenth century, Indigenous women have produced texts in English that reflect and re-inscribe Indigenous principles of law and social order, as well as challenge the force of settler colonial law. Native women writers have made visible the burdens and structures of violence that make Indigenous women and children particularly vulnerable to state disciplinary power (such as public execution, military warfare, massacres, state-sanctioned starvation, and the removal of indigenous children from their families) and extra-judicial violence (land theft, fraud, murder, rape). This essay reviews major works and criticism, organized in three overlapping categories: writing about the law and criminality; writing about prison and carcerality; and writing Indigenous law. These writers mastered new languages and genres to assert Native rights and make legible multiple forms of violence against Native communities. Across time and circumstance, Native women’s writing has had very little distance from the law, or from the law’s claim over their bodies, families, and futures.

Keywords

Indigenous womenlawgenderviolencecarceralitylaw and literatureIndigenous law
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Native American Literature , pp. 233 - 252
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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