In his study of the Modoc War of 1872–73, Boyd Cothran describes the nineteenth-century as a period that “perfected” the imperial mythology of American innocence. In an attempt to portray indigenous peoples as criminal threats to the enlightened, civilized, and white settlers of the Republic, he argues, the media succeeded in convincing “white Americans that they were the victims of the Indian wars and not in fact the victorious aggressors.”1 Tragically, these early colonial formations and mythologies still play a significant role in how we construct the other, the savage, and the terrorist. In fact, as both Cothran and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo point out, it’s no coincidence that the US military’s code name for Osama Bin Laden was none other than “Geronimo.”
Winner of the 2017 John Hope Franklin Prize for the most outstanding book published in American studies, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States, examines how the figure of the indio bárbaro still frames our understanding of the “savage other” today. The title of the book, she explains,
is intentionally a play on the derogatory term “Indian giver.” An “Indian giver” is someone who takes back something they have willingly given or sold, and the slur derives its meaning from another popular myth of U.S. history, that the Indians gifted colonists their land, fair and square, and now they unjustly demand its return. By contrast, Mexican historiography openly recognizes the violence and injustice of indigenous dispossession and the hands of Spanish conquistadors. (12)
Drawing on a rich array of sources like laws, maps, novels, billboards, and even the 2007 film No Country for Old Men, Saldaña-Portillo shows “that Mexican and US national geographies are neither natural nor strictly politically derived. Rather, they are the effect of visualizing indios and Indians in landscape” (17). Depending on various spatial and temporal factors, Indigenous peoples were imagined in many ways. They were tame, but also barbaric. They were savages. Saviors. Victims. These varied and oftentimes contradictory views reflect how indigenous representations were constantly in flux, playing essential roles in the formation of space, place, and identity in the US-Mexico border. “In sundry ways,” Saldaña-Portillo writes, “Indians and indios are the condition of possibility for the emergence of the United States as well as Mexico” (11).
In the symposium’s first essay, Jacqueline Hidalgo praises Saldaña-Portillo’s rich methodological approach that includes literature, film, and a “Freudian psychoanalysis of horror and melancholy.” For Hidalgo, it is important that Indian Given draw on these vast resources “because navigating the losses of whiteness in the Americas requires a different sent of analytical tools and approaches than employed in measuring something more empirical.” By helping to contextualize what Hidalgo calls the “racial nightmares of our present,” Saldaña-Portillo exposes the unsettling, uneven, shifting, and oftentimes interrelated notions of race in the Americas. As a religious studies scholar, Hidalgo calls on her fellow colleagues in the field to wrestle with the significant implications of Saldaña-Portillo’s work. “Religious notions and practices around purity and around scriptures as technologies of power have obviously informed racial geographies,” Hidalgo observes. And while religious rhetoric and practices have contributed to its share of “nightmarish” racial violence, Hidalgo reminds us that “so too have religious geographies been used in attempts to broaden our sense of humanity.” With Saldaña-Portillo, then, Hidalgo invites us to “find glimpses of utopian alternatives” that seek to interrupt the violent effects and affects of racial geographies.
In our second essay, Gabriel Estrada similarly notes the substantive contributions made by Saldaña-Portillo’s methodical approach in Indian Given, especially in its ability to influence future researchers in Chicanx/Latinx studies and indigeneity discourses. At the same time, Estrada invites Saldaña-Portillo to consider a few critiques. For one, Estrada questions the privileging of certain theoretical voices like Henri Lefebvre and Sigmund Freud over those of prominent American Indian theorists. “To critique US, Mexican, and Chicano settlerism without critiquing Indian Given’s European male architects of modern and postmodern theory for their cis-heteropatriarchal colonial legacies,” Estrada writes, “creates an uneven analysis.” Ultimately, Estrada invites readers to consider what kinds of conversations might open up if “4th World/decolonial/indigenous methodologies” served as the book’s primary analytical framework instead of Saldaña-Portillo’s “3rd World/post-colonial/post-Chicano Nationalist methods.” In addition, Estrada wonders if Indian Given pays sufficient attention to the intersectional dynamics of race, class, and gender. Estrada proposes, for example, that a more focused gendered critique could contribute to Saldaña-Portillo’s discussion of the “male warrior stereotype as imagined within the male settler imaginary.” One of Estrada’s worries considering this “male settler imaginary” is that it too often oversimplifies the “complex indigenous genders, kinships, and cosmologies” that require our careful exploration and analysis.
Lori Gallegos de Castillo, in the symposium’s final essay, offers the provocative question: “Is there or has there ever been a feminine analog to the indio bárbaro?” Traditionally, she explains, the “barbaric” has often been understood in terms of how one group might threaten the purity, security, or wellbeing of a culture’s “good” women. But what would happen, she asks, if we refuse to “cover over the profoundly complex and historically crucial stories of agency and victimhood of women,” and instead, following Saldaña-Portillo, challenge the numerous “historical narratives that portray indigenous groups as mere resistors to colonial expansion?” “Saldaña-Portillo’s accounts of different indigenous groups’ various political interests, their complex and shifting alliances, their acts of revenge and betrayal, and even their participation in the brutal violence that was a part of political or military strategy,” Gallegos de Castillo writes, “have the important effect of illuminating the agency of indigenous peoples in ways that simpler resistance narratives do not.” As such, Gallegos de Castillo invites us to complicate the dominant male-driven narratives of colonizer (father) and colonized (son), making sure we not only examine the phenomenology of being an “hijo de la chingada” but also that of “being la chingada, or la que chinga.” After all, Gallegos de Castillo asks, how are we as scholars “able to tell the stories of mass miscegenation and of the birth of a nation without telling the stories of actual women who were mothers, lovers, victims, contributors, and resistors to colonialism?”
Whether we’re talking about terrorists in the middle East or the drug cartels in northern Mexico, Saldaña-Portillo shows that that our understandings of the “savage other” cannot be fully grasped without interrogating the early colonial perceptions of indigenous peoples—both real and imagined—in the U.S. and Mexico border region. So what if Bin Laden is nicknamed Geronimo? What’s the harm in a seemingly innocuous codename? Saldaña-Portillo argues that “this naming gesture” turns both Al Qaeda and the Apache into “relics of a past long fought and forgotten.” In addition, it “frees the imperial U.S. citizen equally from her responsibility in the U.S. genocidal past against indigenous peoples and from her responsibility over the U.S. genocidal present in the Middle East.” In short, Indian Given forces us to examine the colonial ideologies that have us view the violence of Bin Laden and Geronimo as “barbaric,” while the imperial, racial, and genocidal violence of the West is seen as “civilized.” “Naming bin Laden Geronimo clears him and Al Qaeda out of the way of the United States’ imperial, triumphal march toward instituting democracy everywhere,” Saldaña-Portillo concludes, “precisely as the indio bárbaro heterotemporally haunts the theater of war in the Middle East” (258).
Boyd Cothran, “Enduring Legacy: U.S.-Indigenous Violence and the Making of American Innocence in the Gilded Age,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (2015) 570.↩