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Two-Eyed Seeing (TES) is a conceptual framework and guiding principle that brings aspects of Indigenous and Western worldviews together to improve well-being for everyone and the Earth. The framework was introduced by Mi’kmaq Elders Albert and Murdena Marshall in 2004 and has since been advocated for by the Canadian Institute for Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Etymology

In the Mi’kmaq language, Toqwa’tu’kl Kjijitaqnn or integrative science is defined as "bringing knowledges together using the guiding principles of Two-Eyed Seeing." Albert Marshall theorizes that TES emerged as a concept among the Mi'kmaq in Atlantic Canada "because Mi’kmaq people are the Aboriginal people of North America who have had the longest experience of living side by side with the newcomers from Europe." Murdena Marshall states that TES "grew from the teachings of the late Mi'kmaw spiritual leader, Healer, and chief, Charles Labrador of Acadia First Nation, Nova Scotia, especially with these words: 'Go into a forest, you see the birch, maple, pine. Look underground and all those trees are holding hands. We as people must do the same.'"

Definition

Two-Eyed Seeing is defined in an article co-authored by Annmarie Hatcher, Cheryl Bartlett, Albert Marshall, and Murdena Marshall as follows:

Two-Eyed Seeing refers to learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing and from the other eye with the strengths of Western ways of knowing and to using both of these eyes together ... Two-Eyed Seeing intentionally and respectfully brings together our different ways of knowing, to motivate people to use all our gifts so we leave the world a better place and do not compromise the opportunities for our youth. The concentration on the common ground between Indigenous and Western ways of knowing means that one does not have to relinquish either position but can come to understand elements of both. The guiding principle of Two-Eyed Seeing in Integrative Sciences allows the Indigenous Sciences sense of the whole “to dance with” the Western Science sense of the parts.

"Indigenous" and "Western"

Since TES is based on the idea of bridging Western and Indigenous worldeviews, when the term is used an explanation of what is meant by Indigenous and Western ways of knowing is commonly provided. Lynn Lavallee and Lucie Levesque state that "the term 'Western' refers to the dominant ideology of the western hemisphere (predominately North America) and 'indigenous' refers to the ideology traced to the earliest known inhabitants of a geographical region."

Application

Two-Eyed Seeing is applied as a way to bridge Indigenous or traditional knowledge with Western ways of knowing.

The Coyolxauhqui imperative is a concept named after the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui to describe a self-healing process involving the inner desire to achieve complete wholeness. The concept was created by Chicana, feminist, and queer theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa.

Definition

Anzaldúa describes the concept as "the path of the artist, the creative impulse, what I call the Coyolxauhqui imperative, is basically an attempt to heal the wounds. It's a search for inner completeness." After an individual is fragmented, they must pull themselves back together. According to Anzaldúa, "after being split, dismembered, or torn apart la persona has to pull herself together, re-member and reconstruct herself on another level." Anzaldúa states that the individual must imagine or reenact their own trauma. Through this process of reenacting one's trauma, a healing process can be enacted.

Decolonial Love

Books

• A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes (1977)
• Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity by Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2008)
• All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks (2000)
• Another Love: A Politics of the Unrequited by Asma Abbas (2018)
• As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance by Leanne Simpson (2017)
• Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human, edited by Rufus Burnett, Jr. (2019)
• Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution by Peter McLaren (2000)
• Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles by Clare Land (2015)
• Decolonial Love: Salvation in Colonial Modernity by Joseph Drexler-Dreis (2018)
• Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial by Laura E. Pérez (2019)
• Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives, edited by Elisa Facio and ‎Irene Lara (2014)
• Islands of Decolonial Love by Leanne Simpson (2013)
• Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared by Trinh T. Minh-ha (2016)
• Methodology of the Oppressed by Chela Sandoval (2000)
• On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh (2018)
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (1968)
• Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love by Antonia Darder (2017)
• Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity by Laura Harjo (2019)
• The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections by Robbie Shilliam (2015)
• The Decolonial Abyss: Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins by An Yountae (2016)
• The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader by Gloria E. Anzaldúa (2009)
• This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (2015, original 1981)
• Towards Corporeal Cosmopolitanism: Performing Decolonial Solidarities by Anjana Raghavan (2017)
• Towards a Philosophy of Caring in Higher Education: Pedagogy and Nuances of Care by Yusef Waghid (2018)
• Ubuntu Relational Love: Decolonizing Black Masculinities by Devi Dee Mucina (2019)
• Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements by Julietta Singh (2017)
• Witnessing: Beyond Recognition by Kelly Oliver (2001)

Articles / Chapters

• "Demetria Martinez's Mother Tongue and the Politics of Decolonial Love" by Ariana E. Vigil (2014)
• "Exploring Pluriversal Paths Toward Transmodernity: From the Mind-Centered Egolatry of Colonial Modernity to Islam's Epistemic Decolonization through the Heart" by Dustin Craun (2013)
• "Love: Law and Land in Canada's Indigenous Constitution" by John Borrows (2019)
• "Playfulness, 'World'-Traveling, and Loving Perception" by María Lugones (2003)
• "Research Justice: Radical love as a strategy for social transformation" by Andrew Jolivétte (2015)
• "Sacred Justice and an Ethics of Love in Marie Clement's The Unnatural and Accidental Women" by Julia V. Emberley (2014)

Memory and the Archive

• Where Memory Dwells by Macarena Gómez-Barris (2008)

A cholo is a male member of a Chicano subculture or lifestyle associated with a particular set of dress and behavior. A chola is a female member of the same subculture. The term was first reclaimed in the 1960s and emerged as a popular identification in the 1980s. Cholo/a youth endure hyper-criminalization because they are commonly associated with criminality and gang activity, even though this is not a necessary precondition of being cholo/a. Other terms referring to male members of the subculture include foo, vato, and vato loco.

Usage of terms

Historical

See also: Cholo § Historical Usage

Cholo was originally used to denote a racialized individual of lower socioeconomic status. It first emerged in the early 17th century as a term used by Spanish colonizers as follows: "The child of a Black male and an Indian female, or of an Indian male and Black female, they call mulato and mulata. The children of these they call cholos. Cholo is a word from the Windward Islands; it means dog, not of the purebred variety, but of very disreputable origin; and the Spaniards use it for insult and vituperation." In the latter part of the 19th century, it referred to "culturally marginal" mestizos of Native American origin, being applied to "peasant mestizos as a pejorative ethnic label to distinguish the rich, the upwardly mobile, and other aspiring members ... from the working class."

Reclamation

In the 1960s, Chicano youths reclaimed the term cholo.

Style

A teddy bear dressed as a cholo.

Cholos

Cholos are often associated with wearing some combination of a tartan, flannel, or Pendleton shirt buttoned at the top over a white T-shirt, a hairnet over short hair combed straight back or a shaved head, a bandana tied around the head and pulled down just above the eyes, reverse baseball caps, dark sunglasses, baggy khaki pants or shorts, long chains, long socks, white tennis shoes, and stylized tattoos.

Cholo style has been identified as combining the loose-fitting comfort of the traditional huipil and baggy draping of the zoot suit donned by the pachuco. Gilberto Rosas describes it as "a fashion that identifies with the illegalities of undocumented migrations." Rosas describes the fashion of cholos as a style which has become criminalized–"a radically conditioned choice to be visibly and self-consciously identified with a criminalized class."

Sociological aspects

Criminalization

Chicano/a youth who adopt a cholo or chola culture endure hyper-criminalization, since police and institutions equate cholo style with a criminal style. Educational institutions and the police "translate cholo as 'gang member'." While older residents in barrios initially embraced cholas and cholos as "a larger subculture not necessarily associated with crime and violence (but rather with a youthful temporary identity), law enforcement agents, ignorant or disdainful of barrio life, labeled youth who wore clean white tennis shoes, shaved their heads, or long socks, as deviant." Convinced by the police and schools of cholo/a criminality, some community members shamed and policed cholos and cholas, "reminiscent of the criminalization of Chicana and Chicano youth during the Zoot-Suit era in the 1940s."

Sociologist José S. Plascencia-Castillo refers to the barrio as a panopticon–a space which leads to intense self-regulation–as cholo/a youth are scrutinized by police to "stay in their side of town" and by the community who sometimes "call the police to have the youngsters removed from the premises." The intense governance of cholo/a identity has deep implications on youth experience, sometimes affecting their physical and mental health as well as their outlook on the future. Some cholo/a youth feel they "can either comply with the demands of authority figures, and become obedient and compliant, and suffer the accompanying loss of identity and self-esteem, or adopt a resistant stance and contest social invisibility to command respect in the public sphere."

In a study of cholos in a Southern California community renamed "Riverland" (in order to protect the confidentiality of the participants), Victor Rios and Patrick Lopez-Aguado discuss how cholos are marked as "human targets" and come to understand their own perceived criminality. Rios and Lopez-Aguado identify that cholos experience routine harassment and arrest by police because they "contradict the dominant image of Riverland as a profitable, carefree resort town." Tito, a self-identified cholo, states, "those fools will tell us to get the fuck out of here 'cause they don't want the tourists to be–or the yeah–the tourists and the white people to get scared."

As stated by Rios and Lopez-Aguado, cholos remain "steadfast in their stylistic stance because their visible opposition appeared to be the entire point," as it is "intentionally oppositional to the mainstream." Santos, a self-identified cholo, stated "I'm not going to change my style just for a stupid ass cop that thinks I'm gonna, you know, get into something." Cholos are aware that their style will not grant them social mobility and often maintain their style after having been rejected by multiple institutions, including "family, schools, police, and the labor market." Rios and Lopez-Aguado explain:

Riverland depended on a docile servant community (of color), available to cater to the whims of this privileged population, but by adopting cholo styles that magnified their visibility in the public sphere, marginalized youth challenged this power and authority–and paid the consequences. Nonetheless, the feeling of dignity and affirmation often outweighed the punitive consequences meted out by the state ... Based on these ideas, the South Riverland youths' adoption of highly visible cholo styles could indicate resistance to the mainstream expectation that they become servants of the privileged whites. Conscious of the few opportunities to find legitimate career paths, Latino youth adopted appearances they knew would block them from the low-level service positions they were expected to fill. They tapped into racist fears of their inherent criminality to create a public impression that would counter the image of the submissive, stigmatized servant. In a racialized, hyperexploited service economy, these youths deliberately put themselves out of service to retain their dignity.

Cultural aspects

Music

Hip-Hop artists Delinquent Habits and Control Machete have been described as representing the cholo subculture.

References

Mexicans and Chicanos have been involved in labor organizing since at least the early 20th century, playing an active role in notable labor strikes including the Oxnard strike of 1903, Pacific Electric Railway strike of 1903, the 1919 Streetcar Strike of Los Angeles, the Cantaloupe strike of 1928, the California agricultural strikes (1931-41), and the Ventura County agricultural strike of 1941, while also enduring forced mass deportations as a form of strikebreaking through the Bisbee Deportation of 1917 and Mexican Repatriation (1929-36). Although these labor struggles were harassed, sabotaged, and violentely repressed, sometimes through war-like tactics, from capitalist owners, who collaborated with and received support from California Highway Patrol, local police, and local community organizations, Mexican and Chicano workers and organizers, particularly in agriculture, were engaged in widespread unionization activities by the 1930s.

Prior to the 1930s, Mexican agricultural workers, many of whom were undocumented, worked in dismal conditions. Historian F. Arturo Rosales recorded of a Federal Project Writer: "It is sad, yet true, commentary that to the average landowner and grower in California the Mexican was to be placed in much the same category with ranch cattle, with this exception–the cattle were for the most part provided with comparatively better food and water and immeasurably better living accomodations." Growers used cheap Mexican labor to reap bigger profits and, until the 1930s, perceived Mexicans as docile and compliant with their subjugated status because they "did not organize troublesome labor unions, and it was held that he was not educated to the level of unionism." As one grower described, "We want the Mexican because we can treat them as we cannot treat any other living man... We can control them by keeping them at night behind bolted gates, within a stockade eight feet high, surrounded by barbed wire... We can make them work under armed guards in the fields."

Unionization efforts were led off by the Confederación de Uniones Obreras (Federation of Labor Unions) in Los Angeles, with twenty-one chapters quickly extending throughout Southern California, and La Unión de Trabajadores del Valle Imperial (Imperial Valley Workers' Union). The latter organized the Cantaloupe strike of 1928, in which Mexican cantaloupe workers demanded better working conditions and higher wages. As described by Arturo Rosales, "the growers refused to budge and, as became a pattern, local authorities sided with the farmers and through harassment broke the strike." Communist-led organizations such as the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union (CAWIU) supported Mexican workers, (e.x., renting spaces for cotton pickers during the cotton strikes of 1933 after they were thrown out of company housing by growers). In response, capitalists used "red-baiting" techniques to discredit the strikes. Mexican working women showed the greatest tendency to organize during the 1930s, particularly in the Los Angeles garment industry, organizing with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, led by anarchist Rose Pesotta.

During World War II, the government-funded Bracero program (1942-64) hinderd unionization efforts. In response to the California agricultural strikes and, in particular, the 1941 Ventura County strike of Mexican and Filipino lemon pickers and packers, growers organized the Ventura County Citrus Growers Committee (VCCGC) and launched a lobbying campaign to pressure the U.S. government to pass laws to prohibit labor organizing. VCCGC joined with other grower associations, forming a powerful lobbying bloc in Congress, and worked to legislate for (1) a Mexican guest workers program, which would become the Bracero program, (2) laws prohibiting strike activity, and (3) military deferments for pickers. Their lobbying efforts were successful: unionization among farm workers was made illegal, farm workers were excluded from minimum wage laws, and the usage of child labor by growers was ignored. In formerly active areas, such as Santa Paula, union activity stopped for over thirty years as a result.

Oxnard strike of 1903

Pacific Electric Railway strike of 1903

1917 Bath riots

Bisbee Deportation (1917)

1919 Streetcar Strike of Los Angeles (maybe)

Mexican Repatriation (1929-1936)

California agricultural strikes of 1933

1992 Drywall strikes

Intersectionality is a theory for understanding how categories of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, color, disability, nationality, citizenship, creed, geographical location, landedness, employment, health, caste, (etc.) are multilayered, not separable, in their relationship to structures of domination. Rooted in critical race theory and Black feminism, intersectionality was developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 to reveal the racialized and gendered dimensions of violence against women of color and demonstrate the limitations of single-axis frameworks in institutionalized (e.g., law) and anti-discrimination discourses. Intersectionality reveals the interconnected ways in which social structures produce and entrench power and marginalization, especially for the most marginalized in society. The theory has been applied to examine an ever-widening range of experiences by attempting to address the concerns of various identity groups in their relationship to operations of power.

Intersectionality has been described by key figures to its development as a theory which must necessarily be particularized. For example, intersectionality’s initial emergence as a product of the juridical erasure of Black women’s subjectivity in anti-discrimination law did not interrogate Black men’s intersectional marginalization vis-à-vis the criminal justice system. Intersectional analyses are always necessarily particularized and therefore provisional and incomplete.

Intersectionality has been identified as broadening feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of white, middle-class women. The broad agenda means that intersectionality is used to find combinations of injustices that are felt by members of society. For example, a black woman might face discrimination from a company that is not distinctly due to her race (because the company does not discriminate against black men) nor her gender (because the company does not discriminate against white women), but by a unique combination of the two. Intersectional feminism aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging the fact that all women have different experiences and identities. While the theory was developed to identify the oppression of women of color under white supremacy and patriarchy, the analysis has been applied by other scholars to examine aspects of social identity. Race and gender bias are two separate issues; however, they can be combined to create even more harm. Intersectionality is used to describe this phenomenon of being impacted and oppressed by multiple sources, but only treated for one.

Intersectionality has been critiqued for being too ambiguous and fragmentary. Critics of the theory perceive it as unorganized and lacking a clear set of defining goals, arguing that intersectionality will be unlikely to achieve equality as a result. As it is based in standpoint theory, critics say the focus on subjective experiences can lead to contradictions and the inability to identify common causes of oppression. Other scholars recognize that, while intersectionality's objectives may be unfocused and incomplete, the concept should not simply be abandoned, because social categories simultaneously have the power to both disenfranchise people as well as mobilize people towards coalition building and collective action.

Modern capitalist society is a society in which a capitalist class of "new elites" and "old elites" concerned with maximizing their wealth secures a political system that serves and protects their interests. Modern capitalist society relies on calculated and systematic production, different from mercantalism. It is defined by the existence of a wage-earning class that functions as the counterpart to a capitalist class. Modern capitalist societies have been described as being highly indvidualistic and focusing on private interests over public welfare.

A relationship in which the interests of a capitalist class conflict with those of a wage-earning class is a basic condition of modern capitalist society. The defense of private property, preserving law and order, maintaining the economic exploitation and political impotence of the wage-earning class, training the wage-earning class in the tasks that modern capitalist society requires to function, educating the wage-earning class to internalize the principles of capitalist-democracy, often in the mass media, and conditioning the wage-earning class to believe that they are autonomous and live in a society ruled by the citizenry, have all been identified as forces which maintain modern capitalist society.

Modern capitalist society is commonly positioned in Western culture as a phase of human progression that is superior or "more advanced" than other forms of society. This perspective was most evidently portrayed through colonial logics which asserted that Indigenous peoples belonged to more "primitive" cultures and therefore had to assimilate into more "civilized" societies. For Marxists, anarchists, and others, rather than represent the end of human history, modern capitalist society is a phase which will lead to the emergence of a qualitatively different form of society. In opposition, liberals and others are opposed to the transformation of modern capitalist society.

Ideology

Modern capitalist society is founded on the belief in means/end rationality and its inherent association with domination over nature, so as to manipulate it to suit material needs, and human beings, so as to organize and discipline them in their control over nature. Means/end rationality has held importance in Western culture for longer than modern capitalist societies have existed. Historians have identified that this idea, at least, originated with Homer.

History

The first modern capitalist society began with the English Civil War (1642-1651), which has been identified as a bourgeois revolution that resulted in the transition from a traditional feudal society to a modern capitalist society.

A Politics of Liberation, Not Inclusion: Revisiting Zoe O'Reilly's "My Life as an Amoeba"

"As far as the rest of the world is concerned, asexual organisms with more than one cell don't exist."

In 1997, Zoe O'Reilly published a short essay titled "My Life as an Amoeba" on the online "Dispatches" section of the Arizona Daily Star referred to as StarNet Dispatches. O'Reilly described herself as being "trained in the martial arts" and expressed her desire to be referred to by her full name: Zoe: Warrior Princess. In the article, O'Reilly defines her asexuality as a lack of or being "devoid of" sexuality and positions her asexuality as inherent ("Like the scorpion told the fox in the old fable, 'It is my nature"). However, O'Reilly does not concern herself too deeply with conforming to a rigid definition of what it means to be asexual. Nor does she otherwise police the boundaries of asexual identity. And while she recognizes the frequency of asexual disbelief many self-identified asexual people endure ("some might say that we aren't really asexual, we just want to think we are"), O'Reilly twists this into an interrogation of who should have the power to determine one's own identity: "Remember this quote, 'I think, therefore I am.' Add a couple words, 'I think I'm asexual, therefore I am.'"

In this statement, O'Reilly powerfully gestures towards the underlying project of identity. Rather than simply defending her asexuality as valid because of its existence as a label representing a distinct identifiable and classifiable form of sexuality in compliance with a legacy of Western medical science, or what philosopher Michel Foucault referred to as, a scientia sexualis ("the science of sexuality"), identity here is envisioned firstly as a tool for self-empowerment (i.e. I am asexual because I think or say I am asexual). This contradicts how sexual identity normally functions in contemporary Western culture: as an overarching structure that human beings must conform to, not have agency over. One is not gay only because they say they are. One is gay because they fit the established criteria for what has been established as gay and they say they are gay. Yet, even then, people are categorized as gay whether they say they are gay or not. The agency of the individual to determine their own identity is demoted underneath the hegemony of Western identity culture. The established identity systems of Western culture simply become understood as a "truth" which defines human existence.

Asexual identity operates in a similar way, or at least it has increasingly since the writing of O'Reilly's essay (see: "The Emergence of Asexual Identity"). Many self-identified asexual people today seem concerned with establishing a clear definition of what constitutes asexuality so that the identity can become crystallized within the established order of identities. It is as if asexuality must claim its territory in the immaterial plane of, what is believed to constitute, the categories of humanity, and the asexual must assert and defend this emerging colony as legitimate so that it may be recognized by and in relation to the other established colonies of identity. Those advocating for this colonial project concern themselves with a politics of inclusion into the established order, rather than liberation from the established order. Although O'Reilly herself does gesture towards the underlying project of identity in a manner which leaves space open for those who do not strictly conform to an established definition asexuality (this will come later among many self-identified asexual people, as the identity gained more recognition and coalesced around a single static definition), inclusion is the focus of her essay.

O'Reilly's vision for asexual identity is not limited to self-empowerment. As she writes in the introductory paragraphs of the piece, "My people are a definite minority group who wish to be recognized like all the others. We want a colored ribbon, a national holiday, coupons for fast food. We want the world to know that we are out there." Here, O'Reilly gestures towards a politics of inclusion–a desire for asexuality to be accepted by organizations, the state, and corporations, relatively, in order to spread awareness of her people. In the article, she wrote passionately about "the asexual" as an "overlooked group"–one that was consistently ignored in institutions such as the media and public education, the latter of which only understood asexuality in the "single-celled variety." Additionally, she seems to be encouraged towards realizing such an objective of inclusion from her own experiences of exclusion: "Sure, I endured the insults that any teen has to live with: "Hey spore girl, let's see some cell division!" Kids can be cruel," although she confirms that she has never felt inferior or unsure of her own asexuality.

Asexual identity expands by the simple process of recruitment, which occurs when others are made aware of the identity and choose to adopt it for themselves.

However, there are threads in O'Reilly's essay which contrast with inclusion

An asexual politics of liberation allows for those who feel oppressed by what may otherwise be referred to as a sexual expectation. Not only a heterosexual expectation, but specifically the sexual component of that social standard in Western culture.

Queue: Ofelia Zepeda, Nora Marks Dauenhauer

Blood memory is a concept first coined by N. Scott Momaday in the 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn rooted in Indigenous worldviews, ancestry, and personal experience regarding the shared embodied remembrance of historical trauma. The concept has been perceived by some scholars with controversy, yet has emerged as a prominent theoretical framework, particularly in Indigenous studies.

This has also been referred to as race memory, which refers to a form of psychological nativism exclusive to people of a certain race/ethnicity, in which their ancestors' experience informs the descendants' life and experiences. Race memory has been described by Tom Feelings as being either conscious or unconscious.

Theory

Momaday refers to blood memory as "a comprehension of the connections between one's family/tribal nation and oneself," a connections which resides in the blood and exists "outside of Western ways of knowing."

Mi’kmaq scholar Bonita Lawrence acknowledges how sociological and critical theory perspectives have described blood memory as "essentialist" and therefore have disregarded the concept. In response, Lawrence writes how blood memory empowers Native people by establishing an undeniable connection between them and the land, insisting "that we are Indigenous because our bodies link us to our Indigenous past" and concluding that within a Western colonial context in which the authenticity of Indigenous people is constantly questioned "we do not have to justify our mixed-bloodedness or lack of Indian status, or to wait for courts and legislation to decide who is Indian, who is entitled or unentitled, and to internalize that logic – our bodies tell us who we are." Furthermore, Lawrence elaborates that blood memory affirms ancient connections which cannot simply be dismissed as "socially constructed":

...blood memory promises us that we can claim our ancestors' experiences as our own, that we can recreate our cultures based on what we carry in our genes. For people damaged beyond recovery by oppression, it offers us the strength of our ancestors to survive and persist. Blood memory, therefore, is incredibly seductive, in this postcolonial moment for urban Native people, as our nations continue to be dismembered, as racism escalates, and the colonizer's logic remains unchecked – as our colonization, in fact, continues unchecked.

Annette Angela Portillo rejects the concept of blood memory as it relates to the "colonial assumption of a purity of blood and lineage," instead employing the term to reimagine "Native American identity based on ancestral memory," asserting that "blood memories are tied to the body and provide Indigenous-centered ways of experiencing one's history." Nancy Marie Mithlo, in her essay "Blood Memory and the Arts" records that "the concept of blood memory is ageless" and that "blood relationships reference not only the common understanding of what is considered biological heritage or race but also, in an expanded sense, the internalized memories of communal history, knowledge, and wisdom."

Controversy

Jace Weaver examines how Native writers have navigated social and cultural belonging versus "blood" or genetic belonging. Geary Hobson argues that "culturally, a person is characterized in terms of where he or she is from, who his or her people are and what [his or her] ways of life, religion, and language are like" while "socially, a person is judged as Native American because of how he or she views the world, his or her views about land, home, family, culture, etc." Hobson excludes "Hispanic Americans" from Native American identity, stating that "while they are undeniably of Indian blood, and genetically Indian, they are nevertheless culturally and socially Spanish. Because of centuries of Catholicism, they are for the most part irrevocably alienated from the Native American portion of their heritage. Thus, to most Native Americans today, it is not merely enough that a person have a justifiable claim to Indian blood, but he or she must also be at least somewhat socially and culturally definable as Native American." Weaver cites Hobson and similarly separates Black Americans from Native American identity, stating "Much the same could be said of most African Americans, many of whom, particularly in the South, have some degree of Native blood but nevertheless identify culturally and socially as Black."

References

• Allen, Chadwick (2002). Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts. Duke University Press.
• Dennison, Jean (2012). Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation. UNC Press Books.
• Lawrence, Bonita (2004). "Real" Indians and Others: Mixed-blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood. University of Nebraska Press.
• Portillo, Annette Angela (2017). Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories: Native American Women's Autobiography. University of New Mexico Press.
• Weaver, Jace (2001). Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture. University of Oklahoma Press.