Cultivated Silence in Nimiipuu/Nez Perce History

• In Event: Histories of Racial Governance and Resistance

Abstract

This paper explores a productive tension about the dialectical nature of silences made apparent when temporal boundaries of research shift. Opposition between silence and dialogue appears in sharp focus when time is bound at or since the emergence of capitalism but the dialectic fades when accounting for continuity in how different Native peoples have used silence in North America before and since the West. To utilize this tension, I draw attention to the intellectual links between Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019), and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949–2012), and the literature about archival silences, world-systems analysis (WSA), and critical Native studies (CNS). This conversation establishes criteria for distinguishing different silence types in archives (with records) about Indigenous people in North America. Analyzing 120 publications from the Nimiipuu/Nez Perce, I demonstrate how Nimiipuu/Nez Perce cultivated silence is a sociohistorical practice that helps (re)balance heritage with social change by 1) protecting people from power, 2) respecting the individual and community, and 3) sustaining dialogue. Cultivated silence reinforces public claims for self-determination and reclamation, confounding the basic principles of power and history in archives by shifting the authority to assert historicity from document verification to how people use their understanding of what happened and why it matters.

Author

• Levin E. Welch, Arizona State University-Tempe