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Mishuana Goeman. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. isbn: 978-0-8166-7791-7. 245 pp.
A West Virginia bill recently introduced (and later shelved) called for the state recognition of various Native American tribal groups, from well-known tribes like the Shawnees and the Cherokees to the mysterious "Uninh." A colleague who studies Native American history in this region pointed out to me that "Uninh" was most likely shorthand on old maps for "Uninhabited Region," a fact that seemed to render this "group" a questionable recipient of state recognition. Leaving the knotty politics of state recognition aside, however, I want to ponder for a moment the gesture that such a name implies: the arrogance of referring to an entire swath of the country as empty and thus available for settlement. Like the blank section on a map that represents "the Louisiana Purchase" as originally French rather than Native territory, this colonial turn-of-hand empties the land of its Indigenous presence.
It is this complicated relationship between maps and the land and peoples they purportedly represent that Mishuana Goeman considers in her book Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Goeman envisions the literature of several twentieth-century Native American women as literary maps: texts that "tell and map a story of survivance and future" (23). Throughout her examination of the work of E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), Esther Belin (Diñé), Joy Harjo (Muscogee Creek), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Goeman articulates a theory of (re)mapping, which she defines as "the labor...