Presenter: McKenna O’Dougherty
Faculty Mentor: Lani Teves
Presentation Type: Oral
Primary Research Area: Social Science
Major: Women and Gender Studies
White, settler-colonial narratives control the legitimization of formal and informal knowledge in modern America, rendering most Americans ignorant of the state of Native communities today. Similar oppressive, heteropatriarchal forces withhold legitimization of the arts as forms of knowledge, especially if the art piece threatens white control. Native feminisms confront both of these “invisible” injustices (among many others), proving that knowledge is planted and grown in relationships between people, and therefore powerfully represented through art.
A close reading of Joy Harjo’s poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” offers evidence that resistance against capitalism, heteropatriarchy and settler-colonialism are displayed in the arts in ways that the “white reader,” usually uneducated in the many modes of resistances, can easily dismiss as apolitical. This dismissal perpetuates the silencing of Native realities and strengthens the historical and present performance of ignorance by the American population regarding ongoing white violence against Native communities. By countering convention and counting artistic works like Harjo’s poem as knowledgeable and resistant, individual readers and the white academy in general can begin to fill in the previously taught-as-blank sections of the Indigenous story with the creative, enduring resistances of Native communities.