In Pieces: Allotments, Kuleana, and Alienated Indigenous Territories

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel coheres around the afterlives of enclosure and allotment, considering private property regimes and their consequences for current, lived, Indigenous geographies. Across the 19th century, our communities entered a world of deeds, titles, and ownership of land. Many have written – and disagreed – on what this major economic and epistemological shift meant for Native communities and their political sovereignty. Whatever the analysis, the legal sanctioning of property transformed land into commodity, entering Indigenous peoples into a capitalist system that turned territory into something alienable (this word, ‘alienable,’ is a common legal term for that which can be sold or transferred to a different owner, though it has roots in 13th century Latin and French words used to describe states of estrangement or insanity). As a result, many of us live in a vast universe of what historian Nick Estes calls “paper worlds,” in which allotment lands belong to disparate and legally vulnerable networks of descendants and inheritors. The papers on this panel take on the affective relationships to place that we are left with: how do we insist on claims through ownership while also rejecting commoditization of homelands; what forms of care for land and each other must we commit to as Native peoples; how do we resist further alienation in a time of late capitalism? Situated in the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies, these papers illuminate the continuing cycles of dispossession that make the United States as settler colony and empire possible, as well as the ensuing disruptions to social relations that are routed and rooted in the land.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Infrastructures of Dispossession and Survivance from the Highway to the Suburbs - Lou Cornum, NYU

• Landlocked - Hiilei J Hobart, Yale University

• Matrilineal Kinscapes in Cherokee Nation - Katie Walkiewicz, University of California San Diego

• Wages of Settlement - Shiri Pasternak, Toronto Metropolitan University

• How to Lie with Settler Maps: Place-Names, Settler Myths, and the Colonial Re-naming of Potawatomi Homelands - Blaire K Morseau, Michigan State University

Chair

• Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Binghamton University SUNY

Biographical Information

Lou Cornum is an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. They are Diné and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli/Native Hawaiian) is an Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies in the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. She is the author of Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2023).

Kathryn Walkiewicz is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation, an Associate Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, and Co-Director of the Indigenous Futures Institute. They are the author of Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

Shiri Pasternak is an Associate Professor of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the author of Grounded Authority (2017) and co-editor of Disarm, Defund, Dismantle (2022).

Blaire Morseau is a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. She is the editor of As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in their Contexts (2023) and author of Mapping Neshnabé Futurity: Celestial Currents of Sovereignty in Potawatomi Skies, Lands, and Waters (2025).