You are not the father: rhetoric, settler colonial curiosity, and federal Indian law

ABSTRACT

In this essay, the author uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explain the specific insistence of blood and economic/personal financial relations as organizing signifiers in federal Indian law, taking Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013) as the primary case study of the author. The author maintains that Lacanian psychoanalysis helps clarify: (1) how these signifiers organize legal rhetorics through the notion of the unconscious; and (2) how the persistence of these signifiers reveals a broad structure of settler colonial curiosity that elucidates the link between federal Indian law’s consistencies and instabilities. The author reasons that settler colonial curiosity is motivated by a curious attachment to the promises of an imaginary nation state as represented through signifiers, arguing that signifiers of blood and economic/personal financial relations function as shaky anchors in the discourse of federal Indian law. As shaky anchors, they draw upon centuries of public affective investment to feign a stability to federal Indian law while also leaving an opening for decolonial unsettling. The author concludes with some implications for psychoanalytic rhetorical criticism and Indigenous decolonial rhetorics.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler colonialism
• federal Indian law
• psychoanalysis
• curiosity
• rhetoric

Acknowledgements

Dedicated to Kenneth and Ash Primack. I express gratitude for support and feedback provided by Hillary Ash, Charles-Anthony Athanasopoulos, Daniel Beresheim, Ryan Blank, Zaza Catchulia, Rishi Chebrolu, Calum Lister Matheson, Krystina N. M. Primack, Jennifer Reinwald, Corinne Sugino, George Weddington, and Robin Kanak Zwier.

ORCID

Alvin J. Primack http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7320-1338

Notes

1 Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, 25 U.S.C. § 1902 (1978).

2 In this manuscript, I discuss federal Indian law within the United States, in which many diverse groups of Indigenous, aboriginal, and/or native peoples, tribes, communities, bands, and nations have individual and collective stakes. As I write about the body of law and its legal categories, I use the terms germane to the discourse. When discussing an individual regarding group affiliation and identity, I use terms the person or their legal representation uses. Although naming conventions vary within groups, I use recognized naming conventions practiced within cultural groups when referring to them.

There is no consensus among—or within—Indigenous groups about which label should be used to describe shared stakes and positions within settler colonial society in the United States. Many labels may “promot[e] the myth that Indigenous Peoples are a monolithic people,” or may reinforce settler colonial ideology. See Michael Yellow Byrd, “What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels,” American Indian Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1999): 16. Terminology varies among Indigenous scholars and writers cited throughout this manuscript, but “Indigenous” is most often used due to its broad applicability and ability to “reflect a common experience—in a structural sense—of genocide and the loss of sovereignty despite the difference in cultural expression” (thanks to Charles-Anthony Athanasopoulos, Corinne Sugino, and Rishi Chebrolu for thinking through this with me). For these reasons, I also default to “Indigenous” in this manuscript.

3 Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, § 1901.

4 Ibid., 1913–15.

5 Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl 133 U.S. 2552 (2013): 2558.

6 Ibid. The attorney misspelled Brown’s name and did not use the correct date of birth. Brown testified that he was not fully informed that the paperwork he eventually signed was to relinquish his rights to Adoptive Couple, believing he was relinquishing his rights to Veronica to Maldonado.

7 Ibid., 2559.

8 In the Matter of the Adoption of Baby Boy L, 231 Kan. 199 (1982): 643 P.2d 168; Mississippi Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield, 490 U.S. 30 (1989).

9 Stephen Wermiel, “SCOTUS for Law Students: Indian Cases at the Court,” SCOTUS Blog, January 4, 2016, http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/01/scotus-for-law-students-indian-cases-at-the-court/ (accessed July 7, 2018).

10 Alex Tallchief Skibine, “Constitutionalism, Federal Common Law, and the Inherent Powers of Indian Tribes,” American Indian Law Review 39, no. 1 (2014): 89.

11 Oral Argument, Leonard Prescott v. Little Six Inc., 387 F.3d 753, 754 (8th Cir. 2004), Case No. 03–3702 (at 14:15–14:55), http://media-oa.ca8.uscourts.gov/OAaudio/2004/6/033702.mp3 (accessed July 7, 2018).

12 April Youpee-Roll, “Just Making It up: On Justice Scalia, Indian Law and the Supreme Court’s Future,” Missoula News, February 18, 2016, http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/missoula/just-making-it-up/Content?oid=2688497 (accessed July 7, 2018); Wermiel, “SCOTUS for Law Students.”

13 Christine Metteer, “Hard Cases Making Bad Law: The Need for Revision of the Indian Child Welfare Act,” Santa Clara Law Review 38, no. 2 (1998): 470–1.

14 Maire Corcoran, “Rhetoric Versus Reality: The Jurisdiction of Rape, the Indian Child Welfare Act, and the Struggle for Tribal Self-Determination,” William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 15, no. 2 (2009): 418–19.

15 See, respectively, Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 2560–1, 2563, 2571–2, 2577–8; 2572–8; 2573–6, 2584.

16 Ibid., 2558. See also Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998).

17 Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 2558.

18 Ibid., 2560.

19 Ibid., 2575, 2586.

20 Transcript of Oral Argument, 28, 31, 38–9, 42, Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2012), 133 S. Ct. 2552, 28, 31, 39, 42.

21 Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 2556; see also 2559, 2566.

22 Bethany R. Berger, “In the Name of the Child: Gender, Race, and Economics in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl,” Florida Law Review 67, no. 1 (2016): 299–300, 326.

23 Dianne Otto, ed., “Introduction,” in Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (London: Routledge, 2018), 1–11.

24 Susan Scott Parish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 57, 63–4 emphasis added.

25 Helga Nowotny and Mitch Cohen, Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 3, 5.

26 Ibid., 5.

27 Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012), 6.

28 Ibid.

29 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, 203.

30 Berlant, Desire/Love, 14.

31 Tiara R. Na’Puti and Judy Rohrer, “Pacific Moves Beyond Colonialism: A Conversation from Hawai’i and Guåhan,” Feminist Studies 43, no. 4 (2017): 539.

32 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 388. Also, thanks to Rishi Chebrolu for helping me formulate this understanding.

33 Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 3.

34 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014): 1–6; Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 6–7; Frank Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?”, Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 229–31.

35 Na’Puti and Rohrer, “Pacific Moves Beyond Colonialism,” 539.

36 For more on rhetorics of difference, see: Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space Through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996): 142–56; Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72.

37 See Jason Edward Black, “Native Resistive Rhetoric and the Decolonization of American Indian Removal Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (2009): 66–88; Danielle Endres, “American Indian Activism and Audience: Rhetorical Analysis of Leonard Peltier’s Response to Denial of Clemency,” Communication Reports 24, no. 1 (2011): 1–11; Casey Ryan Kelly, “Dètournement, Decolonization, and the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969–71),” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2014): 168–90; Randall A. Lake, “Enacting Red Power: The Consummatory Function in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69, no. 2 (1983): 127–42; Malea Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing,” College Composition and Communication 53, no. 4 (2002): 396–434; John Sanchez and Mary E. Stuckey, “The Rhetoric of American Indian Activism in the 1960s and 1970s,” Communication Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2000): 120–36.

38 Endres, “American Indian Activism and Audience,” 3.

39 Kelly, “Dètournement, Decolonization, and the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969–71),” 170, 185.

40 For more on opting out, see Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out, 28–38, 40–2.

41 Walter R. Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided (Golden, CO: Fulcrum 2012), 3.

42 Casey Ryan Kelly, “Rhetorical Counterinsurgency: The FBI and the American Indian Movement,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 10, no. 1 (2007) 223–58; Mark Meister and Ann Burnett, “Rhetorical Exclusion in the Trial of Leonard Peltier,” American Indian Quarterly 28, nos. 3–4 (2004): 719–42; Richard Morris and Mary E. Stuckey, “‘More Rain and Less Thunder’: Substitute Vocabularies, Richard Nixon, and the Construction of Political Reality,” Communication Monographs 64, no. 2 (1997): 140–60; John Sanchez, Mary E. Stuckey, and Richard Morris, “Rhetorical Exclusion: The Government’s Case Against American Indian Activists, AIM, and Leonard Peltier,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23, no. 2 (1999): 27–52; Craig R. Smith, Karen Rasmussen, and Stephanie J. Hurst, “Suppression of Native American Culture,” in Silencing the Opposition: How the U.S. Government Suppressed Freedom of Expression During Major Crises, ed. Craig R. Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 87–123.

43 Kelly, “Rhetorical Counterinsurgency,” 226, 253.

44 Meister and Burnett, “Rhetorical Exclusion in the Trial of Leonard Peltier,” 720–1.

45 Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance,” 397.

46 Ibid., 402.

47 Ibid., 427.

48 Calum Lister Matheson, Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic Age (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2018), 6.

49 Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), ix.

50 Ibid., 2.

51 Ibid., 26–7.

52 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, 20; Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2012), 51–3.

53 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, 53–5.

54 Calum Lister Matheson, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” in Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From “The Freudian Thing” to “Remarks on Daniel Lagache,” eds. Derek Hook, Calum Neill, and Stijn Vanheule (London: Routledge, 2020), 132, 136.

55 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 41, 68, 245–6.

56 Ibid., 264–5.

57 Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3.

58 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, 61, 53–5.

59 Scott Kouri and Hans Skott-Myhre, “Catastrophe: A Transversal Mapping of Colonialism and Settler Subjectivity,” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 3 (2016): 281.

60 Ibid.

61 Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 3.

62 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X: Anxiety, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 48.

63 Lacan, Écrits, 414.

64 Derek Hook, Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and Identification in Psychology and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2018), 15–17.

65 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 82–3.

66 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X, 65.

67 Lorenzo Veracini, “Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal: The Settler Colonial Situation,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2008): 366.

68 Ibid., 368.

69 Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror, 217–21.

70 James Monroe, “Second Annual Message: November 16, 1818,” The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29460 (accessed July 4, 2018).

71 Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, eds., “Introduction: Origin and Development of the American Indian Boarding School System,” in Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 9–13.

72 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), 91–2; Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 69.

73 Margaret D. Jacobs, “Indian Boarding Schools in Comparative Perspective: The Removal of Indigenous Children in the United States and Australia, 1880–1940,” in Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences, eds. Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 220–1.

74 Tonya Gonnella Frichner, The Indian Child Welfare Act: A National Law Controlling the Welfare of Indigenous Children (New York: American Indian Law Alliance, 2010), 1.

75 Task Force Four: Federal, State, and Tribal Jurisdiction, Report on Federal, State, and Tribal Jurisdiction: Final Report to the American Indian Policy Review Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), 88.

76 Senate, Hearing Before the United States Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs: Appendix C: Prepared Statements from Private Organizations, American Civil Liberties Union. 95th Cong., 1977, 397–9.

77 Robin Leake et al., “Findings from a National Needs Assessment of American Indian/Alaska Native Child Welfare Programs,” Child Welfare 91, no. 3 (2012): 57.

78 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 268–9; Casey Ryan Kelly, “Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill and the Racialization of American Indian Identity,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (2011): 242–3.

79 Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” 268–70. See also Ken Montgomery, “Banal Race-thinking: Ties of Blood, Canadian History Textbooks and Ethnic Nationalism,” Paedagogica Historica 41, no. 3 (2005): 318–19.

80 Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 36.

81 Kelly, “Blood-Speak,” 243–4.

82 Rose Stremlau, Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 14.

83 Ibid., 13.

84 Transcript of Oral Argument, 10, 41, 56–7.

85 Ibid., 39 (inflection and laughter: 36:26–36:32, https://apps.oyez.org/player/#/roberts6/oral_argument_audio/21959 (accessed July 7, 2018)).

86 Ibid., 38–43.

87 Ibid., 61, 63.

88 Ibid., 45.

89 Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 2556.

90 Peter Odell Campbell, “The Procedural Queer: Substantive Due Process, Lawrence V. Texas, and Queer Rhetorical Futures,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 2 (2012): 209.

91 Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 2556–7, 2559–60.

92 Ibid., 284–5.

93 Brief for the Tanana Chiefs Conference, Bristol Bay Native Association, Association of Village Council Presidents, Central Council of Tlingit And Haida Indian Tribes Of Alaska, Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, Native Village of Barrow, and the Orutsaramiut Native Council, in Support Of Respondents App. 9, 14, Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl 133 U.S. 2552 (2013).

94 Ibid., 2573–5, 2579–80, 2582–3.

95 Ibid., 2583.

96 Erin J. Rand, “Fear the Frill: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Uncertain Futurity of Feminist Judicial Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 81.

97 Kendall R. Phillips, “The Event of Dissension: Reconsidering the Possibilities of Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 62.

98 Beenash Jafri, “Desire, Settler Colonialism, and the Racialized Cowboy,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013): 79.

99 Kelly, “Blood-Speak.”

100 Constitution of the United States of America, Article 1, sec. 8, clause 3.

101 ICWA, § 1901.

102 ICWA, § 1901, 1918.

103 Brief for the Navajo Nation as Amicus Curia Supporting Affirmance, 11, Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl 133 U.S. 2552 (2013).

104 Ibid., 14, 15.

105 Brief of Amicus Curia the National Native American Bar Association Supporting Affirmance, 13–14, Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl 133 U.S. 2552 (2013).

106 Ibid., 16.

107 Brief of Wisconsin Tribes as Amici Curiae Supporting Respondents, 21, Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl 133 U.S. 2552 (2013).

108 Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 2558.

109 Ibid., 2558–9.

110 Christian Lundberg, “Revisiting the Future of Meaning,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 182.

111 Transcript of Oral Argument, 17–18.

112 Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 2565.

113 Dana L. Cloud, “The Rhetoric of ‘Family Values’: Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility,” Western Journal of Communication 62, no. 4 (1998): 387–419.

114 Khanna, Dark Continents, 220–2; Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out, 111.

115 Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out, 44–5.

116 Lundberg, “Revisiting the Future of Meaning,” 181–2.

117 Matheson, Desiring the Bomb, 6.

118 Ibid., 12.

119 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, 53–4.

120 Phillips, “The Event of Dissension.”

121 Robert Cover, Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, eds. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 203.

122 Matheson, Desiring the Bomb, 18–19.

123 Alvin J. Primack, “Youth Sexting and the First Amendment: Rhetoric and Child Pornography Doctrine in the Age of Translation,” New Media & Society 20, no. 8 (2018): 2930.

124 George Chauncey, “‘What Gay Studies Taught the Court’: The Historians’ Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas,” GLQ—A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 509–38.

125 Phillips, “The Event of Dissension,” 67.

126 Jenny Rice, “Pathologia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 38.

127 Phillips, “The Event of Dissension,” 69–70.

128 Matheson, Desiring the Bomb, 3.

129 Ibid., 5–6.