Toby “Winema” Riddle was a Modoc woman who was a translator in the Modoc War (1872-73).  After the Modoc War, Riddle became known as “The Pocahontas of the Lava Beds” because she famously saved Indian Agent Alfred Meacham’s life during a peace talk. I compare Riddle to another native mother, Fanny Ball, a daughter of Kientpoos or Captain Jack who was a leader of the Modocs and was caught, imprisoned and executed.  Fanny does not exist in the historical record, she was not forced to leave Oregon for Oklahoma after the war with the rest of the Modocs who were held as prisoners of war but remained behind.  She is my ancestor but she is a ghostly progenitor. Building on Dian Million’s “Felt Theory” where she argues Indigenous women’s scholarship is undervalued because “we seek to present our histories as affective, felt, intuited as well as thought,”  I examine both women through a native feminist reading methodology that looks beyond settler colonial representations and instead uses recognition, which is not legal or state sanctioned but a practice that involves seeing what is enduring apart from settler colonial representations as a methodology to analyze the political and social impact of their lived experiences.

Angie Morrill (Klamath Tribes) is a PhD candidate in ethnic studies at University of California, San Diego and Coordinator of Native Recruitment in the Office of Admissions at UO.  The working title of her dissertation is: “Native Futures: Reclaiming the Native Mother,”  and examines the figure of the pathologized native mother through settler colonial representations and argues that using recognition as a methodology, there is another native mother who emerges through text, visual media and archival absence and refusal.  The native mother is a significant political and social figure whose presence cannot be erased, who is enduring and gestures always towards a decolonizing future.