Christopher Pexa | Harvard University (original) (raw)

Papers by Christopher Pexa

Studies in American Indian literatures, Sep 1, 2023

American Studies, 2015

Many US and Canadian Indigenous scholars and activists critique and oppose capitalism as part of ... more Many US and Canadian Indigenous scholars and activists critique and oppose capitalism as part of their decolonization efforts. Yet many also reject Marxism. There are numerous reasons, but the fact is, many Indigenous people do not see Marxism as a useful tool for or even relevant to their struggles. Furthermore, a history of antagonism between some Marxists and Indigenous Studies scholars and activists persists. Despite all of Karl Marx's brilliance, elements of his theories just do not fit with the history and lived experiences of American Indians or the Indigenous populations in other liberal democratic settler colonial states such as Australia and New Zealand. And of course Marx was 'a man of his times,' which is a polite way of saying that he was a racist. Indeed, it is difficult to understate the racism at play when even Marx himself believed that the horrors of capitalism would at least have the benefit of dragging supposedly primitive, savage (that is, 'dark') people into the modern world, where they could then accept the blessings of socialism. Swap 'capitalism' for 'violent conquest' and 'socialism' for 'Jesus' and it suddenly starts to sound like the worst kind of imperial Christianity. Glen Coutlhard is both Indigenous (Yellowknives Dene) and a leftist. And he is walking the line. On the one hand, Coulthard believes that Indigenous scholars who discount Marxism are making a mistake. However, he also asserts that some Marxist scholars have been belligerent, ignorant, dismissive and even racist in their rejection of Indigenous people's contributions to radical thought and politics, while some who are more sympathetic and well-meaning have often unwittingly adopted anti-Indigenous postures. Coulthard's goal is not to blame the participants in these debates. Rather, he aims to build a bridge between the two sides. He believes we must confront capitalism without sublimating Indigenous claims against colonialism, and confront settler colonialism in ways that oppose capitalism. But Coulthard's loyalties are clear. His primary interest is using leftist theories to help Indigenous people decolonize. He also sincerely believes that Indigenous

MELUS;, 2018

On the day of the Jonestown massacre, Jim Jones’s voice on the so-called FBI “Death Tape”— transc... more On the day of the Jonestown massacre, Jim Jones’s voice on the so-called FBI “Death Tape”— transcripts of which appear in The Jonestown Institute’s online archive—reveal his weirdly compelling performance in several registers and roles, not least of which as a kind of prophet. With a voice by turns stammering and composed, Jones repeatedly attempts to draw the congregation of the People’s Temple away from questions about the past to act out his apocalyptic fantasy, where death in an unjust world is better than life in it. For instance, when reminded by Peoples Temple member Christine Miller of his former promise to move the community to Russia, should their mission fail in Guyana, Jones dismisses her as “a very good agitator,” backward-looking, unimportant, and above all, an obstacle to the arrival of his own version of heaven’s kingdom. Indeed, at first Jonestown was for many of its members a utopian extension of the Peoples Temple, a religious group that, as Rebecca Moore describes in Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple (2009), “emerged from Indiana in the 1950s, moved to northern California in the 1960s, [and] became a political force in San Francisco in the 1970s” (1). Moore and other scholars (Moore, Pinn, and Sawyer; Hall; Wessinger) have attempted to reframe the Peoples Temple compound at Jonestown in ways that complicate the dominant depictions of it ......................................................................................................

American Literary History, Feb 1, 2023

In the opening chapter of Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Siou... more In the opening chapter of Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) recounts a comment made "some years ago at a Congressional hearing" by Cheyenne River Sioux tribal council member, Alex Chasing Hawk. When a Congressman asked, "Just what do you Indians want?," Chasing Hawk replied, "A leave-us-alone law!" (27). While Deloria's focus is mainly on being or getting free of white settler academics and "do-gooders," his anecdote broadly underscores the discourse of tribal self-determination that President Nixon acknowledged a year later, with the formal ending of the federal policy of termination and relocation. There Nixon emphasized that the termination of federal obligations to tribes-including health care, education, and public safety services-and relocating tribal citizens to major American citizens was "wrong" because "the unique status of Indian tribes.. .. is the result. .. of solemn obligations which have been entered into by the United States Government." These "obligations" included treaties as well as other "formal and informal agreements" that "often" led to tribes "surrender[ing] claims to vast tracts of land" (565). "To terminate this relationship," Nixon concludes, "would be no more appropriate than to terminate the citizenship rights of any other American" (566). This anecdote and its expression of a desire for freedom from settler law that is only or mainly achievable through settler law, along with Nixon's take on tribal sovereignty, invoke a logic of rights/obligations to imagine Indigenous futurity. The right to be left alone is the flipside of a rights/obligations discourse that recalls *Christopher Pexa is Bdew aka˛tu˛wa˛Dakota from the Spirit Lake Nation and Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where his work is dedicated to Indigenous literatures, politics, and language learning and revitalization.

Studies in the Novel

This special issue participates in a watershed moment in the history of Indigenous Young Adult (Y... more This special issue participates in a watershed moment in the history of Indigenous Young Adult (YA) literature. In 2021, the American Library Association (ALA) for the first time awarded the Caldecott Medal for "the most distinguished American picture book for children" to an Indigenous artist, Michaela Goade (Tlingit), who illustrated We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom (Turtle Mountain). The following year, the ALA for the first time presented a Newbery Medal Honor Award for "distinguished contribution to American literature for children" to an Indigenous writer, Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache), for her novel A Snake Falls to Earth. The ALA also included several Indigenous works in its "2022 Notable Children's Books" list: Ancestor Approved: Intertribal Stories for Kids, edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith (Muscogee Creek), whose novel Hearts Unbroken (2018) is the subject of one of the essays in this issue; Borders by Thomas King (Cherokee); Healer of the Water Monster by Brian Young (Navajo Nation); Sharice's Big Voice: A Native Kid Becomes a Congresswoman by Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk) and Nancy K. Mays; and We Are Still Here! Native American Truths Everyone Should Know by Traci Sorell (Cherokee). Such mainstream recognition and approbation is, of course, but part of the story. Indigenous people have been telling stories for young audiences for a very long time and writing children's and young adult books for well over one hundred years. From oral literatures that enthralled Indigenous youths gathered around the fire, to early written work by Charles Alexander Eastman

Native American and Indigenous Studies, 2018

MELUS, 2018

Fred D’Aguiar’s book-length poem, Bill of Rights (1998), imagines the life of a survivor of the N... more Fred D’Aguiar’s book-length poem, Bill of Rights (1998), imagines the life of a survivor of the November 18, 1978 mass suicide and killing that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana. Using a multi-voiced persona to reflect on both the traumatic events of Jonestown and the problematics of surviving trauma, the poem enacts a ritual performance of remembering and healing for both its poetic persona and audience: a ritual complicated by complexities and contingencies of not only representation, but of trauma itself. The poem’s persona, having escaped death at Jonestown, suffers from the compulsion to repetitively re-enact his experiences there. His repetitions, while aimed at psychic wholeness, only reproduce the original trauma, with the poem fracturing into multiple voices as an enactment of his dissolution. The tacit theory of reiterative performance that D’Aguiar’s poem advances, then, is one of failure rather than liberation: a bill of rights enumerated and desired, but unlived and, perhaps, unlivable. It is in this sense, of a foreclosing of conditions for the present coherence of the subject, that the poem describes an impossible futurity, where the conditions of its impossibility lie in the colonial conditions of Jonestown itself. The poem’s depiction of post-traumatic reconstruction as being necessarily partial is, in effect, an anti-poetics created and maintained by coloniality itself: language fails to remake a coherent subject of experience, and the only future is one where a wounded and unstable subject predominates.

Studies in American Indian Literatures, 2017

PMLA, 2016

Dakota author Charles Alexander Eastman’s early collection of stories for children, *Red Hunters ... more Dakota author Charles Alexander Eastman’s early collection of stories for children, *Red Hunters and the Animal People* (1904) was largely viewed by Eastman’s critical contemporaries as a politically-innocuous analogue to Kipling’s *Jungle Book Stories.* Through consideration of the Dakota oral-historical genre of hituŋkaŋkaŋpi (“long ago stories”), and of Dakota peoplehood more broadly, this article proposes an alternative view of Eastman as a resistance writer who cited a long-circulating Dakota kinship philosophy to critique the enduring conditions of U.S. settler-colonialism—a critique that would become more pointed in Eastman’s later, better-known autobiography, *From the Deep Woods to Civilization* (1915). In viewing Eastman’s animal tales as being critical of U.S. colonialism, we may see more clearly his innovative translations of Dakota politics into narratives that at once sentimentally appealed to and challenged U.S. settler society, and that these challenges came specifically in relation to Dakota conceptions of peoplehood, power, and gift.

Christopher Pexa. "Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen ... more Christopher Pexa. "Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Sean Coulthard (review)." American Studies 54.2 (2015): 130-131. Project MUSE. Web. 15 Sep. 2015. <https://muse.jhu.edu/>.

Wicazo Sa Review, 2015

Despite being known by Minnesotans as a “second civil war,” and as a campaign of ethnic cleansing... more Despite being known by Minnesotans as a “second civil war,” and as a campaign of ethnic cleansing by Dakota, the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War remains an understudied event in the history of U.S. imperialism. Through readings of Dakota prisoners’ letters, this essay examines how Dakota experienced and resisted state power in the concentration camps that were created following the war. By focusing on the slippages between English and Dakota languages, languages which of course mediated the mass conversions of Dakota prisoners, I argue that we may see more clearly what I call the “transgressive adoptions” of White culture by imprisoned Dakota. Transgression appears under the guise of compliance or “assimilation” (converting to Christianity, learning to write and read, practicing vocational trades), where the adoption of forms of Whiteness did not mean relinquishing Dakota values, but instead merely afforded some of Whiteness’s privileges. These transgressions importantly cleared space for forms of solidarity and resistance that were unintelligible to non-Dakota, but were latent in norms and practices of the tiyospaye, or Dakota/Lakota extended family. Writing letters to family imprisoned elsewhere, some Dakota prisoners were able to maintain, and even extended the reach of, kinship relationalities and so reclaimed an important basis for remembering, decolonizing, and remaking a wounded Dakota peoplehood.

Wicazo Sa Review, 2005

The journal began in 1985 after Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, the "dean" of American Indian stud... more The journal began in 1985 after Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, the "dean" of American Indian studies, inherited some money from her grandmother's [End Page 5] probate. By then a number of fledging AIS programs existed across the nation, while some others had fallen victim to budget ...

Teaching Documents by Christopher Pexa

This seminar will examine notions of the promise in comparative perspective, taking treaties as a... more This seminar will examine notions of the promise in comparative perspective, taking treaties as an especially consequential and problematic historical context for collective promise-making. We will historicize the practice of treating in the case of the United States especially, observing how it has worked as an alibi for settler-colonial practices of dispossession and replacement of indigenous peoples, but also how it grows from and sustains a contractual logic that is itself based in white supremacy.

Our texts will be actual treaties as well as literary depictions of treaties and political declarations, from Westphalia to the United States's treaty era with indigenous nations (1784-1871) to the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Our inquiry will highlight differences between nation-state and indigenous-national theories of political promise-making, and will highlight the affinities between settler colonialism, contracts, and the ongoing dispossession and extraction of indigenous lands by settler states. Crucially, we will also look at indigenous forms of self-determination that challenge territorially-bounded concepts and exercises of sovereignty.

Our exploration will thus not be limited to treaties, as the course will explore further instances, contexts, and possibilities for imagining and representing collective political will. Throughout the course we will explore how critical indigenous methodologies are crucial to present-day indigenous politics and aesthetics. We will move thematically toward an emerging critical focus on trans-and inter-indigenous coalitional politics and on decolonizing theories and practices of self-determination aimed at the refusal and rupture of settler state domination.