Today’s discussion of Deloria’s text was a tough one to process because of the complex ways we began to conceptualize modernity and traditionalism in relation to agency. Although Deloria is historically identifying the “unexpected” narratives of the 19th and 20th century, whihc allow us to see how Natives are indeed reaffirming, while simultaneously challenging white colonial expectations, he is also providing a theoretical framework that can be useful to contemporary discussions of Native agency in what I think Kim or Annita called a “playfulness of the settler’s imagination”. Annita aimed to take us there with her examples of anticolonial knowledge productions, but I think what happened in class today, yet I can only speak for myself, is that I got stuck in the modern and traditional, which unfortunately affected my inability to go to where Annita wanted us to go in terms of identifying these “unexpected” moments in contemporary productions of native agency as they complicate the boundaries of the modern and the traditional. Some of the questions that are still lingering in my head are questions that both Annita and Kim raised. They are: What does indigenous modernity look like and how are natives looking at those imaginative processes for their own political mobilization? And, do they (the Northern Cree and tribe called red) fit these unexpected frameworks or are they mainstreamed? These questions stood out to me because it complicates not only the way settler imagination creates expectations, but how Natives themselves are aware of those imaginative processes and often times they themselves use them, which goes back to this idea of “playfulness” that Annita or Kim raised, to mobilize their own agendas. Therefore to me, the modernity and traditional discussion was more about identifying how they do happen simultaneously and not in terms of dichotomy, which is why I think a lot of us in class had a difficult time grasping these concepts in the first place. I hope we can come back to this in class next week.
Have a good night y’all.
Have a good night y’all.
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