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Spaces of violence: indigenous figuration and Los Angeles colonial culture

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Spaces of Violence: Indigenous Figuration and Los Angeles Colonial Culture
by
Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment for the
Doctorate of Philosophy in Sociology
August 2017

Copyright by
Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne
All Rights Reserved

Mo’e’hahne 2
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements: 4

Introduction: The Arcs of Colonial Violence and Indigenous Figuration, 7

Settler-Colonial Power, Indigenous Abjection, and Colonial Culture, 16
Colonial Affects, Indian “Play,” and the “Transit of Empire,” 22
Urban Settler-Colonial Occupation, 34
Settler Common Sense and the Spatiality of Los Angeles, 36
Temporality, Indigenous Critical Theory, and Race, 44
The Sociology of Settler-Colonial Society and Social Texts, 52
The Colonizing Bios, Necropower, and the Nomos of the Settler Colony, 54
The Spaces of Violence in Occupied Yaanga, 72

Chapter One: Colonizing Yaanga: Necropolitics, Raciality, and the Indigenous Body, 78

Narrating Los Angeles Settler Colonialism and Raciality, 82
Torrents of Spanish Violence and the Indigenous Body, 90
Colonizing Yaanga, 98
Race, Reproduction, and the Settler-Colonizing Bios, 100
“The Indigenous Body in Pain” at Yaanga, 104
La Plaza and Olvera Street: Re/producing Colonial Space through Time, 111
Mid-Twentieth-Century Settler Urban Re/development and Tourism, 113
Transit and “Multi-Cultural” Settlement at El Pueblo Park, 117
Identifying the Indigenous Body at La Plaza de Cultural y Artes, 123
Enacting Settler Colonialism through Colonial Affect and Indigenous Abjection, 130
Colonial-Racial Affect and the Sliding Grammars of Indigeneity, 135
Conclusion, 141

Chapter Two: Animating the Indigenous, Colonial Affects, and “Going Native” in the City:
Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles,147

Moving-Image Indians, 152
“I Lost My Identity on Main Street,” 155
Alcohol and Indigenous Labor in Yaanga, 160
The Exiles and Indigenous Speech, 161
Locating the Indigenous, 163
Colonial Scopophilia, Violence, and Indigenous Sexualities, 166
Gendering Indigenous Futurity, 172
The Queerness of Indian Hating, 178
Representational Violence and its Affects, 186
Conclusion, 188

Mo’e’hahne 3
Chapter Three: Corporeal Consumption and the Everyday Violence of Indigenous Figuration:
“Uncle Yu Indian Theme Restaurant,” 190

“Pocahontas and Yosemite Sam Built a Restaurant...and the People Came,” 196
Settler-Colonial Phenomenologies and Indigenous Object Necro-Economies, 201
The “Past-Present” of Indigenous Death/Objects, 207
Playing the Indian Woman, 211
Visualizing Female Indigenous Abjection, 214
Indian Play and Multiple Patriarchies, 219
Conclusion, 223

Chapter Four: “Embracing the Future:” Suburban Settler Reproduction, Gabrielino High School,
and the Figure of the Child, 227

Suburban Settler Common Sense: The Home and Futurity, 231
Non-Whites and Commodified (Suburban) Indigenous Homelands, 237
Settler Sexuality and Migration Policy, 240
Suburban Settlerism and Raciality, 243
“Our Children’s Future is Our Mission,” 248
The Naming Contest and the Figure of the Child, 253
The Contest Entries and the Figure of the Indian, 258
Everyday Indigenous Appropriation, 262
Symbolic Transformations at Gabrielino High School, 264
Gabrielino-Tongva Children and Mission San Gabriel, 270
Conclusion, 275

Coda: The Necropower of Indigenous Figuration: Settler Militarism and the Traces of Yaanga,
278

Bibliography: 292

Mo’e’hahne 4
Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my advisors Macarena Gómez Barris, Leland Saito, and David Treuer for
their support along the many intellectual paths that led me to and through this project. This
dissertation would not have been possible without the writing group that Maca created. Thank
you Crystal Mun-Hye Baik, Jih-Fei Cheng, and Maca for your close readings and thoughtful
comments. I am grateful for my friendship with Alex Trimble Young throughout this journey.
Our conversations and collaborations have helped shape my intellectual path, while our travels
and hikes provided much-needed breaks from institutional settings. Thank you Stachelle
Overland for your friendship and guidance. Without Stachelle many students would have a
tougher time. Through Maca’s steadfast support and the energy of our colleges, the Indigenous
studies and decolonial thought working group provided a me with an intellectual home within the
Department of American Studies & Ethnicity (ASE). Thank you to the faculty, staff, and
students of ASE for maintaining such important spaces for learning. Thank you, Becka Garrison
and Sarah Fong, for friendship within and beyond the university.
I owe a special thanks to the organizers and panelists of the 2011 Race and Sovereignty
Symposium at UCLA for providing invaluable learning experiences and inspiration for the
beginning stages of this project. Thank you Duane Champagne and Leland Saito for helping me
through those early attempts to parse the relations of Indigeneity and racialization—quandaries I
am still working through. Thank you to the organizers of and my collaborators at the annual
meetings of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the American Studies
Association, and the Western Literature Association (WLA) for the opportunities to share my
work. Thank you Lisa Tatonetti and the WLA’s Louis Owen’s awards committee for generously
supporting my work. Thank you Lorenzo Veracini for your feedback on various iterations of this
Mo’e’hahne 5
project. Thank you Jashmine Corpuz, Liz Shon, and Nix Guirre for your friendship, support, and
care along this journey.
I am forever indebted to my ancestors and relatives who continue to survive and fight.
Over the past three centuries, for us, nothing has come easily.
Mo’e’hahne 6
For J.R., J’Shon, Chuck P., and Krystal

Mo’e’hahne 7
Introduction:

The Arcs of Colonial Violence and Indigenous Figuration

Los Angeles used to be home to Indians. There were no trees. They ate small sea creatures and
deer but the “Indians” disappeared in 1769 with the building of the missions…Junípero Serra
was a proponent of corporal punishment, they broke up the families, segregated the genders and
suppressed their religion. They worshipped the earth…

-Museum guide, Point Vicente Interpretive Center, Rancho Palos Verdes, California, April 2016
1

The unique position of the Indian in this society is anomalously fixed and mutable, here and
there, truth and fiction. The Indian has been for a long time generalized in the imagination of the
white man. Denied the acknowledgement of individuality and change, he has been made to
become in theory what he could not become in fact, a synthesis of himself…he is rather, to the
public mind, that lonely spectre who stood for two hundred years in the way of civilization...

-N. Scott Momaday, “The Morality of Indian Hating”
2

Set in the Hollywood and East Hollywood neighborhoods of Los Angeles, the
independent film Tangerine (2015) follows a day in the life of Sin-Dee and Alexandra, two black
trans/women who move through the worlds of sex work. After being released from jail, Sin-Dee
learns that her white “pimp” boyfriend has been sleeping with a cisgender woman while she was
incarcerated.
3
Sin-Dee and Alexandra “embark on a mission to get to the bottom of the
scandalous rumor.”
4
The women’s search “leads them through [the] various subcultures of Los

1. A white female museum docent described Los Angeles’s Indigenous and colonial histories in these terms
during a public tour. The docent lead a visitor along the life-size diorama of naked Indigenous “Gabrielino”
figures—women, children, and men. The figures stood in front a wooden hut that was, in fact, built from the trees
that the docent claimed did not exist in the LA region. Such practices of casting the Indigenous into the past and
rendering them as merely geological time is representative of the settler-colonial, common-sense knowledges of Los
Angeles, disciplinary knowledges that are shaped by and simultaneously reflect the necropolitics that engulf the
region.

2. N. Scott Momaday “The Morality of Indian Hating,” Ramparts Summer (1964), 30.

3. In the film, Sin-Dee uses the abjecting term “fish” to refer to her boyfriend’s mysterious new cisgender
lover. The film thus constructs an antagonism between cisgender and transgender woman.

4. Magnolia Pictures, “Tangerine: Final Press Notes,”
http://www.magpictures.com/presskit.aspx?id=062313f8-875d-408f-b6b3-b0ff64b18885, accessed 10 February
2017, 2.
Mo’e’hahne 8
Angeles” that the white, (cisgender) male director and co-writer, Sean Baker, imagines.
5
Located
in spaces filled with low-income, multiethnic communities, Tangerine also follows an
Armenian/American cab driver, Razmick, that hides his sexuality from his wife and children.
Razmick ferries passengers through the streets of Los Angeles. His stream of passengers
represents the multiethnic colonial cosmopole that Los Angeles has become. Towards the
beginning of the film, Razmick picks up a racially ambiguous man. After inquiring about
Razmick’s origins, the man proceeds to tell him: “I’m from Oklahoma and I’m a Cherokee
Indian.” He continues:
I got a girl’s name, Mia. It’s a feminine name in English but it’s not in Cherokee. I was
named like all Indian Cherokee babies are named: first thing the mother sees when the
baby is born she names that fuckin’ baby. So, when I was born my momma looked out
the window...and seen a Redbird...Cherokee Indian name for Redbird is Mia Mia. So, she
called me Mia...I’m glad she didn’t look out the window and see an outhouse. Can you
imagine, here comes big shit Thompson!

Within the moving space of the cab, the “Indian” appears as one of subcultures of Los Angeles
and recounts a trite narrative of imagined Indigenous naming practice. In a film that tells the
story of racialized and migrant subjects trapped by hetero/normativity, the lone, transient, self-
identified “Cherokee Indian,”
6
is anxious about his gendering within the regimes of settler-
colonial sexuality. Rather than allowing the sign “Mia” to potentially exist between genders, he
insists on fixing it to avert potential misrecognitions within the Anglophone colonial culture.
However, according to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Redbird is “totsuwa” in the Tsalagi

5. Ibid.

6. Furthermore, as the numerous measures taken by the Cherokee Nation, The United Keetoowah Band of
Cherokee Indians, and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians illustrate, in addition to the work of scholars like Circe
Sturm, Cherokee identity and culture is among the most appropriated and impersonated in the United States settler
colony. As such, the character is likely an actor playing Indian. See Circe Sturm, Becoming Indian: The Struggle
over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2011).

Mo’e’hahne 9
language rather than “mia.”
7
Through self-deprecating humor, the “Cherokee Indian” abjects the
supposed sign of the Indigenous culture that he carries with him through life, his name. He also
rehearses what Rayna Green identifies as the long-standing Euroamerican cultural practice of
making Indians the butt of jokes.
8
Tangerine thus “transits”
9
the Cherokee Indian—an embodied
trace of transnational settler colonialism, whose homelands lie in geographies other than Los
Angeles—in order to mark a further descent into the alternative worlds of carnal commerce
where gender is not fixed.
10

Inspired by the lives of the trans/women of color that he befriended at the Los Angeles
LGBT Center, director Sean Baker set out to make a film that, in his words, “provided a
nonjudgmental, level-headed look at individuals who are often marginalized in the broader
cultural conversation.”
11
According to N. Scott Momaday, colonial praxes of Indian hating are
often crafted through appeals to “morality.” Motivated by white colonial affective desires to
represent the other, Tangerine’s Indigenous figuration, therefore, embody what N. Scott
Momaday calls the “morality of Indian hating.” Sean Baker’s filmic worlds also demonstrate the
“queerness” of Indian hating: the “Cherokee Indian” from Oklahoma is made to embody the

7. Cherokee Nation, “Cherokee Language Consortium Word List,” Accessed 5 April 2017,
http://www.cherokee.org/Portals/0/Documents/Language/Consortium%20Word%20List.pdf?ver=2015-08-03-
101121-650. Additionally, according to the “Online Cherokee Dictionary” maintained by Georgia Southern
University, “Redbird” is “tsi-s-qua” in Tsalagi. See “Online Cherokee Dictionary,” Accessed 5 April 2017,
http://cherokeeonlinedictionary.org/.

8. Rayna Green, The Only Good Indian: The Image of the Indian in American Vernacular Culture (Phd.
Dissertation, Indiana University, 1973), 147-152.

9. Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011).

10. The screenwriters, Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch, set out to show the everyday, monotony of the
characters’ lives “before getting to the fireworks.” The Indian marks the “mundane” of Los Angeles before the
fireworks of gendered misrecognition. Magnolia Pictures, “Tangerine : Final Press Notes,” 5.

11. Magnolia Pictures, “Tangerine : Final Press Notes,” 3.
Mo’e’hahne 10
backwardness of heteronormativity that the characters in Tangerine are attempting to move
beyond vis-à-vis queerness. The film’s Indigenous figuration also erases the gender diversity of
Tsalagi/Cherokee lifeworlds, past and present, while positioning the Indian as doubly fated to
disappear, being replaced by both settler biopolitics and non-normative sexualities. In Tangerine,
the speaking Indigenous subject is a colonialist trope that creates narrative space for the settler-
colonial worlds of Los Angeles to unfold on-screen, worlds that displace and replace the actual
Indigenous peoples of the region, the Gabrielino-Tongva and Fernandeño Tatavium.
There is a salient orientation in Euroamerican settler-colonial culture towards
apprehending the Indigenous as an open-ended signifier, one that can be reconfigured and
invested with meaning in the service of colonial common sense, desire, possession, and
reproduction.
12
Spaces of Violence: Indigenous Figuration and Los Angeles Colonial Culture
analyzes how the figure of the Indigenous emerges in the colonial public cultures of Los
Angeles. I examine how the figure of the Indigenous is animated in primarily non-white social
and cultural spaces as means to displace actual Indigenous socialities of the Los Angeles region.
While multitudes of racialized violence have unfolded in the spaces of Los Angeles and have
been documented, particularly through the critical race and ethnic studies scholarship that has
emerged over the past forty years, the historical and contemporary violences against Indigenous

12. My analysis of settler colonialism and the structures of feeling it produces draw on Sara Ahmed’s
theorization of “orientations.” Ahmed writes that “[t]he concept of ‘orientations’ allows us to expose how life gets
directed in some ways rather than others, through the very requirement that we follow what is already given to us.”
When used to consider formations of settler biopolitics and reproduction, orientation reveals how and where the
production of life/lives gets directed. “We might speak then of collective direction: of ways in which nations or
other imaged communities might be ‘going in a certain direction’…Becoming a member of such a community, then,
might also mean following this direction, which could be described as the political requirement that we turn some
ways and not others.” The paths that subjects are encouraged to follow and the objects they become drawn
towards—Indigenous land, Indigenous lives—are the result of power directing what is phenomenologically
perceptible, normal, and valuable within a given context. See Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Objects,
Orientations, and Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 21, 15.
Mo’e’hahne 11
peoples in the region go largely unacknowledged in both public-popular and academic discourse.
Spaces of Violence, therefore, excavates what Macarena Gómez-Barris calls the “submerged”
13

and often elided histories of anti-Indigenous violence in the region. Spaces of Violences seeks to
articulate a “perspectival”
14
shift in how Los Angeles is conceptualized and narrated in both
academic and popular signification by recasting it as a collection of exemplarily settler-colonial
formations. Spaces of Violence posits that the violences perpetrated against Indigenous peoples
constitute the foundational social relations of the Los Angeles settler-colonial order.
I analyze colonial formations from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries
in order to analyze the persistence of colonial violence and Indigenous abjection throughout the
mid to late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Indigenous figuration identifies the ways
that Indigenous subjects, bodies, socialites and signs are apprehended and then animated in
colonial culture. Figuration also names the ways that categories of Indigeneity, that is, being
Indigenous to a place and time, are configured in the matrices of colonial power. I use
“Indigenous” and “Native” to name the possible categories of life, death, and belonging that have
been violently interpellated through the fungible category of the “Indian” in North America
broadly and the Los Angeles region specifically.
The forms, moments, and texts that I read are connected to specific spaces of ongoing
anti-Indigenous violence. I focus on two sites: Yaanga and the San Gabriel Valley. As I will
demonstrate, these spaces are pedagogically significant and materially and biopolitically
instrumental to the ongoing colonization of the Gabrielino-Tongva and Fernandeño Tatavium
homelands that are currently occupied by the Los Angeles settler cosmopole. The Indigenous

13. Macarena Gómez-Barris, “Mapuche Mnemonics: Reversing the Colonial Gaze through New Visualities
of Extractive Capitalism,” Radical History Review 124 (January 2016): 94.

14. Ibid.
Mo’e’hahne 12
figurations found in these webs of colonial culture, therefore, serve to manufacture consent with
settler-colonial regimes of Indigenous elimination, Indigenous dispossession, and colonial
occupation by naturalizing the relations of force that undergird and thereby re/produce settler-
colonial society.
The Gabrielino-Tongva are an Indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin and the San
Gabriel Mountain foothills. With their relatives, the Fernandeño Tatavium, they have lived in the
Los Angeles region since time immemorial. The Gabrielino-Tongva homelands are occupied by
the present-day boundaries of Los Angeles and Orange counties. They stretch from the San
Gabriel Mountains in the north (spaces now identified by the violent significations of Mission
San Gabriel) to the Cupeño, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay homelands to the south
15
and the Serrano,
Cahuilla, and Chemehuevi the homelands to the east, further inland. The Fernandeño Tatavium
homelands comprise the San Gabriel Mountains and foothills of what is currently identified as
the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys. The Gabrielino-Tongva and the Fernandeño
Tatavium are not juridically recognized as “American Indian tribes” by the United State federal
government. Members of both socialities, however, appear on what are known as the California
Indian Judgement Claims Rolls, records of tribal members that were compiled by the settler state
in the early twentieth century in order to “settle” land claims with Indigenous peoples living in
what became the state of California.
16
Because the Gabrielino-Tongva and Fernandeño Tatavium

15. The boundaries of the Gabrielino-Tongva homelands are liminally marked in the south by the violently
forged site of Mission San Juan Capistrano, which was founded in 1776.

16. According to Carole Goldberg and Duane Champagne, the historic experiences of California Indians
“created distinct conditions relevant to the question of recognition” notably the “creation of lists or ‘rolls’ of
California Indians for purposes of distributing land claims judgments during the 1940s and 1960s.” “These judgment
rolls, which were established for purposes of distributing the judgment funds, purport to list all individuals who were
residing in the State of California as of June 1, 1852, and their descendants now living in said state.” See Goldberg,
Carole and Duane Champagne. “A Second Century of Dishonor: Federal Inequities and California Tribes,” A report
prepared by the University of California, Los Angeles American Indian Studies Center for the Advisory Council on
Mo’e’hahne 13
are not recognized as “American Indians,” they are denied reservations, the “legally” sanctioned
articulations of “self-determination” that are permitted by US regimes of governmentality (such
as “recognized” tribal governments), and the settler-colonial sovereign to Indigenous sovereign
relations of “treaty obligation” and “trust responsibilities” that normatively structure US political
relations with Indigenous peoples in occupied North America.
17

The Los Angeles region is home to an estimated fifty Gabrielino-Tongva villages.
Yaanga is one such village that is currently occupied by downtown Los Angeles. The largest
village in the region is Puvugna, which is currently occupied by California State University,
Long Beach.
18
Yaanga was engulfed by Spanish colonialism beginning 1781 and it is the site
were the colony that would become Los Angeles was forged. The peoples and spaces of Yaanga
have been subjected to centuries of violence and its many spatial significations through the
unbroken genealogies of Spanish, Mexican, and United States occupation. Today, as the location
of numerous structures of colonial administration and domination, the center of a regional and
global political economy, and public settler commemorative sites, the spaces of Yaanga remain
integral to the symbolic, material, and biopolitical ordering of Los Angeles settler colonialism.
The spaces of the San Gabriel Valley contain Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, the first Spanish
colony in the Los Angeles region that was established in 1771. These Indigenous homelands

California Indian Policy (1996). See also Jurmain and McCawley. O, My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal for the
Gabrielino-Tongva People of the Los Angeles Area (Berkeley: Heyday, 2009); Heather Valdez Singleton,
“Surviving Urbanization: The Gabrieleno, 1850-1928,” Wicazo Sa Review, 19, no. 2 (2004).

17. Although not “recognized” by the federal government, both Indigenous peoples have formed local
tribal governments, in the form of non-profit organizations. With these non-profits, they apply for limited resources
in the form of federal and state grants. However, the resources are extremely limited and do not include the forms of
development, education, social service, and security resources that federally recognized Indigenous peoples have
(limited) access to. See Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, “Contesting American Indian Identifications: Blood Logics and Settler
Colonialism in Los Angeles Native Community Politics” (Master’s Thesis, University of Southern California),
2013.

18. Jurmain and McCawley. O, My Ancestor, 7-12.
Mo’e’hahne 14
have also been continually occupied and repopulated by Spanish, Mexican, and US colonialisms.
Throughout the late twentieth century, the San Gabriel Valley has become the site of suburban
and globally oriented transnational East Asian and Southeast Asian political and population
economies of scale. In the nineteen eighties, the city of Monterey Park, California became the
first Asian/American majority city in the North American US settler colony. Over the past thirty
years, the region has been transformed by biopolitical shifts away from white flight suburbia into
a collection of majority non-white suburban communities.
Scholars such as Jack D. Forbes, Huanani-Kay Trask, Candace Fujikane, Dean Itsuji
Saranillio, Tiya Miles, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, and Jodi Byrd have made significant
contributions to analyses of the relationships between racialization, Indigeneity, and colonial
power in the settler colonizations of North America and the Hawaiʻian Archipelago.
19

Nevertheless, in many formulations of critical Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies
across Anglophone North American, Pacific, and Oceanic colonial contexts racial whiteness
remains the analytical focus and the theoretical center of settler power and settler violence.
Because non-white social and cultural contexts remain undertheorized in these fields of inquiry,
Spaces of Violence analyzes non-Indigenous and non-white social formations of settler

19. For instance, see Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the
Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Huanani-Kay Trask,
“Settlers of Color and Immigrant Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawaiʻi” in in eds. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y.
Okamura Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi. Honolulu:
University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008); Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation
of Oklahoma (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002); Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland, Crossing Waters,
Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Tiya Miles,
Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California,
2005); Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2010); Malinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the
Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández,
Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011); Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and
Indigenous Difference,” Settler Colonial Studies, 3 no. 3–4 (2013): 280–294; Byrd, The Transit of Empire.

Mo’e’hahne 15
colonialism. I primarily read Mexican/American, Asian/American, and multiethnic social forms
in order to demonstrate both the diffuse and multiracial character of Los Angeles settler-colonial
hegemonies.
20
I employ methods of discourse analysis drawn from interpretive cultural sociology
and interdisciplinary cultural studies.
21
I also incorporate forms of textual and visual analysis
from literary studies and cinema studies to read the public spatial and representational settler
cultures of Los Angeles.
In this introductory chapter, I frame Space of Violence through theorizations of settler-
colonial power, analyses of how Indigenous people are “figured” in Euroamerican colonial
culture, and colonial commonsense conceptions of “space.” I engage conversations in Indigenous
critical theory to propose a sociology of settler-colonial society that seeks to analyze the long
temporal arcs of colonial violence as they are manifest in everyday cultural practices. I also
analyze examples of settler-colonial commonsense narrations of the “spatiality” of Los Angeles
in order to illustrate the need for Indigenous critical theorizing of the settler-colonial city. I

20. In some instances, the forms I analyzes are structured by a colonizing whiteness. However, these
formation do not reflect the normative theorizations of racial whiteness found in so called critical whiteness studies
because, as I will show, in the Spanish and Mexican colonial epochs, forms of “white” colonial possession
resembled what twentieth-century analysts would identify as “multiracial” social forms. For normative renderings
of US racial whiteness and white possession see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of
the American Working Class. 1991. (New York: Verso, 1999); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in
Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Matthew
Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1998).

21. Spaces of Violence draws on genealogies of experimental and interpretive sociologies of culture, race,
violence, and memory. For instance, see Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination. 1997. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black:
Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Denise da Silva, Toward a
Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean
Diaspora Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Macarena
Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009); Macarena Gómez-Barris and Herman Gray eds., Toward A Sociology of the Trace (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

Mo’e’hahne 16
conclude with a reading of how “biopolitics” is normatively theorized and its applicability to
settler-colonial contexts.

Settler-Colonial Power, Indigenous Abjection, and Colonial Culture

The modes of domination, othering, and regimes that I analyze are the results of settler-
colonial occupation. Settler colonialism is a distinct colonial formation where the colonizers seek
to acquire new territories, establish new societies (through both biopolitical reproduction and
articulations of sovereignty that are separate from the imperial metropole), and enact new
political economies. By contrast, extractive colonies or “colonies of exploitation,” according to
Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, rely on the “appropriation of land, natural resources and
[Indigenous] labor” through “indirect control by colonial power through a small group of
primarily male administrators, merchants, soldiers, and missionaries.”
22
Extractive colonies are,
therefore, premised on the appropriation of resources, the subjection of the Native, and
repressive labor regimes that rely on Indigenous labor, whereas settler colonialism is organized
by the whole-scale appropriation of land and the liquidation of the Native population in order to
produce a new, permanent colonizing society. With settler colonization, the Indigenous,
therefore, must be removed from the land and eliminated through oscillating mechanisms of
violence. Patrick Wolfe describes settler colonization as being primarily organized by colonial
quests for territory and formations of Indigenous replacement and elimination:
The primary object of settler-colonization is the land itself rather than the surplus value to
be derived from mixing native labour with it. Though, in practice, Indigenous labour was
indispensable to Europeans, settler-colonization is at a base a winner-take-all project
whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement. The logic of this project, a

22. Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds. Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race,
Ethnicity and Class. (New York: Sage, 1995), 4.

Mo’e’hahne 17
sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range
of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct – invasion is a structure not an
event [emphasis added].
23

Settler colonization is premised on the acquisition of land because it is from Indigenous
homelands that the expanding colony and its political economies are forged. In the Foucauldian
sense, Wolfe explains this logic of elimination “might be called the settler-colonial will, a
historical force that ultimately derives from the primal drive to expansion.”
24

While these characteristics represent transnational patterns of settler colonization, for
example, most exemplified by the Anglophone settler colonies of North America, the Pacific,
and Oceania (the United States, Canada, Alaska, Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and
Australia), Margaret D. Jacobs also writes that settler colonialism represents a continuum.
25

Elements of extractive colonization, Indigenous slavery, and settler colonization are normally
practices in most settler colonial societies. For example, the mixing of colonial forms can be
found in the Hispanophone colonies throughout the Americas as well as Dutch, British, and
German settler colonialisms in Southern Africa.
26
Indigenous labor is an important element of
the settler project, that is, until Indigenous people are render completely disposable by settler
biopolitics. Regardless of the ways that Indigenous people are incorporated into the settler
political economy, the telos remains the same, elimination. In the context of Los Angeles

23. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics
of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 163.

24. Ibid., 167.

25. Margaret D. Jacobs. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal
of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2011).
26. Edward Cavanagh, Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and Dispossession
on the Orange River (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 16-19.
Mo’e’hahne 18
colonial occupation, I argue that forms of both extractive and settler colonialism were practiced
under all three colonial occupations (Spanish, Mexican, and United States).
The work of settler colonization, however, is never complete, even as the settler
occupation of Indigenous land and life continues into the present. Although settler-colonial
sovereignty appears totalizing, its liminality is inscribed in the very lands that it seeks to occupy
by lived Indigenous presence and resistance. The settler-colonial polity, and by extension settler
biopolitics, are, therefore, always unstable, shifting, and in need of additional colonial subjects to
insure the regimes of Indigenous dispossession, elimination, and replacement continue. Lorenzo
Veracini argues that the “population economies” of settler societies constantly require settler
migrations from the imperial metropole and regimes of settler reproduction to insure Indigenous
replacement.
27
The spatiality of settler colonization is also not fixed. For example, the nominal
spatial boundaries of the North American US settler colony were not made “continuous” until the
late nineteenth century, nor where the “boundaries” US’s Caribbean colonial siege outposts. The
transhemispheric geopolitical boundaries of US colonial occupations in the sub-arctic, arctic, and
the Pacific were also not “formalized” until the mid-twentieth century. In the colonial present,
US settler-imperialism and its war machines continue to expand and engulf Oceanic spaces
through settler colonizations facilitated primarily by the US military. The recent media flash
points in the Standing Rock/Dakota region, for instance, also demonstrate the enduring realities
of colonial occupation, the political economies of extraction, and state and non-state regimes of
anti-Indigenous violence that characterize settler colonization. These events also highlight the
realities that settler-colonial occupation is never complete or uncontested by Indigenous peoples.
However, the ways that these media spectacles function(ed) settler discourse as narratives that

27. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), 16-18.
Mo’e’hahne 19
“alert” non-Indigenous colonial observers to the violence of Indigenous life illustrate how the
settler colonialization of Indigenous lifeworlds is naturalized in the US common sense.
28
Patrick
Wolfe argues that the violent collisions produced by colonialism create “regimes of race” and the
categories of racial others. “[J]ust as for Durkheim, religion was society speaking,” Wolfe writes,
“race is colonialism speaking, in idioms whose diversity reflects the variety of unequal
relationships into which Europeans have co-opted conquered populations.”
29
Regimes of
racialization thus arise from colonial conflicts over social space. “[R]acialisation represents a
response to the crisis occasioned when colonisers are threatened with the requirement to share
social space with the colonised.”
30
Settler-colonial occupation creates distinct relations of power
where Indigenous peoples are “racialized” in relation to their homelands and the ever-expanding
colonial population economies and political economies. The epistemes of anti-Indigenous
violence that underwrite settler colonialism represent the racial idioms of colonial occupation.
In analyzing settler-colonial modes of domination, where colonial occupation is
omnipresent for Indigenous peoples and yet largely unacknowledged by colonists and
naturalized in matters of quotidian, I conceptualize culture as both representational discourse as
well as material, embodied, and spatial praxes. Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge define
“public culture” as the stories, texts, and images that are often intended for and consumed by
large audiences, which also have the potential to serve as sites of debate and meaning making for

28. The events also illustrate how the political economies generated through settler occupation and extraction are
naturalized as are the population economies created by regimes of Indigenous dispossession.

29. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 5.

30. Ibid., 14.

Mo’e’hahne 20
society.
31
Reading colonial public cultures through Antonio Gramsci’s formulation of
hegemony,
32
I argue that the public cultures of Los Angeles function as pedagogical repositories
of ideology
33
that discipline settler subject’s epistemological and phenomenological practices.
These relations of common sense go beyond mere dialectics of the “state” and “civil society.”
Rather, as Lorenzo Veracini theorizes, modes of settler-colonial “sovereignty” operate both
alongside and beyond the nation state as shifting and mobile enactments of power that are
premised on the colonists’ “self-constituting ability” and “competence to control the local
population economy.”
34
In this way, we can speak of multiple settler hegemonies and common
sense knowledges that are articulated by localized settler sovereignty and enacted by the settler
polis: the local normative, colonial modes of collective social life and cultural practices.
In settler-colonial discursive and material practices, Indigenous people and their
representational analogues normatively exist in what Judith Butler theorizes as the “domain of
abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to the

31. Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge. “Debates and Controversies: Why Public Culture?”
Public Culture 1 no. 1 (1988).

32. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith. (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 260-267. Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the
Study of Race and Ethnicity” in eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies, (London: Routledge, 1996), 411-441.

33. For instance, I work through Stuart Hall’s definition of ideology, which Hall defines as “the mental
frameworks—the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation—which
different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the
way society works.” Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” 25-26.

34. According to Veracini, through “isopolitics” settlers enact and create new mobile sovereignties that
follow them and that are always defined in opposition to Indigenous “sovereignties,” even if such sovereignties are
rendered invisible. For example, Veracini writes: “The sovereignty claimed by settler collectives does not focus on
the state and insists on the law-making corporate capacity of the local community, on its self-constituting ability, on
its competence to control the local population economy, and a subordination to the colonizing metropole that is
premised on a conditional type of loyalty.” Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 72.

Mo’e’hahne 21
domain of the subject.”
35
For Butler, the abject identifies “those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’
zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the
status of the subject.”
36
Through the “heterosexual power matrix,” Butler argues that the full
subject is constructed in opposition to these zones of uninhabitability.
37
(It is this constitutive
outside to power that Butler reveals is, in fact, missing from Foucault’s theorizations of the
disciplinary regulations of the “species body”).
38
For Butler, the body is materially and
discursively produced as sexed, gendered, and raced through expressions of power that are
animated by relations of othering. While Butler is theorizing the violent exclusions that are
experienced by subjects who are not interpellated
39
as “full subjects” by the heterosexual power
matrix, settler-colonial practices of assigning meaning, intelligibility, and possibilities for life to
Indigenous bodies (that are interpellated as “Indian,” “savage,” and “Native”) also occur along

35. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3.

36. Ibid. Cultural studies engagements with abjection have also been theorized in more psychoanalytical
terms, for instance, Julia Kristeva writes that relations of abjection derive from delineating the subject’s autonomy
from the parent by creating a “clean and proper body” that allows it to speak in the first person. When this boundary
of the subject’s identity is threatened, the “in-betweenness” or “ambiguity” creates the abject. See Elizabeth Grosz,
“Julia Kristeva,” Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. E. Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
197-198; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982),
4.

37. According to Butler, the “heterosexual power matrix” is comprised of interlocking discursive and
material regimes of power that, in the Foucauldian sense, are located on the site of body through the body’s
discursive production. Here, Butler is concerned with how bodies are given meaning through the discursive
production of “sex” which produces some bodies as “intelligible,” and therefore human, while others are rendered
“abject.”

38. My reading here is also informed by Evren Savci’s theorizations of power, sexuality, and abjected
others. See Evren Savci, Queer in Translation: Paradoxes of Westernization and Sexual Others in the Turkish
Nation (Phd diss: University of Southern California, 2011). See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138.

39. While Marxian analyses wedded to the base, (super) structure, and production triad—and its many
mutations—represent a continuation of structuralist thought, Louis Althusser’s formulation of the practices of
categorical and ideological hailing, “interpellation,” still prove useful in deconstructing the ways that Indigeneity is
called forth and programmatically applied to subjects and socialities in the service of settler-colonial common sense
ideologies that support the occupation and possession of Indigenous homelands. Louis Althusser, On the
Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian. (London: Verso,
2014), 260-270.
Mo’e’hahne 22
axes of “abjection” and “intelligibility.” However, in the settler-colonial power matrix,
heterosexuality is but one regime of disciplinary ordering that functions alongside distinct
colonial relations to space, land, the body, and life itself. The relations of force created by
settler-colonial occupation are also organized by a distinct form of what Michel Foucault has
called biopolitics. In Spaces of Violence, I assemble an alternative model of biopolitics where
Indigenous liminal subjects exist as the abjected “constitutive outside” of the full settler-colonial
subject. I argue that the Indigenous subject represents the abject because of the ways that
Indigenous socialites are actively erased from the spaces and landscapes under settler-colonial
occupation, actively eliminated through regimes of corporeal violence and “objectification,” and
normatively rendered as punitively past-tense beings.

Colonial Affects, Indian “Play,” and the “Transit of Empire”
American Indian and Native studies scholars have long analyzed how Indigenous
people are imagined in Euroamerican colonial cultures and the dialectical relations of
colonial violence that these cultures actively create.
40
In 1964, N. Scott Momaday
published the essay, “The Morality of Indian Hating.”
41
In many ways, Momaday
analyses the relations and discourses of settler-colonial power that American Indian
studies and critical Indigenous studies have critiqued since their inception, in addition to
covering intellectual ground that the emerging discourses of settler colonial studies has
worked to articulate. In the essay, Momaday reads the arcs of genocidal and cultural

40. For instance, see William Apess, “Eulogy on King Philip, as Pronounced at the Odeon, in Federal
Street, Boston,” 1836, in A Son of the Forest and Other Writings, 103-138, eds. by Barry O’Connell (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).

41. N. Scott Momaday “The Morality of Indian Hating.”

Mo’e’hahne 23
violence that have been visited on Native people in North American since the seventeenth
century in relation to the shifts in settler-state Indian policy that, following the Second
World War, sought to assimilate Indigenous populations, and resulted in large-scale
Indigenous migrations to cities.
42
Momaday asserts that “[m]ore important than the
tangible history of white-Indian relations...is the interaction of ideas and attitudes which
inform that relationship and transcend it.” Momaday contends that, in fact, “[t]hose ideas
and attitudes are, on both sides, matters of morale and morality.”
43
By reading the
ideologies and symbols that underwrite episodes of settler brutality and their
representations in colonial discourse, Momaday theorized the moral character of
Euroamerican anti-Indigenous violence. According to Momaday, “[t]he persistent attempt
to generalize the Indian...has resulted in a delusion and a nomenclature of half-truths,”
such as “[t]he so-called ‘Indian problem.’” Momaday writes that the Indian problem is
“misleading and dangerous, for it holds up the attractive suggestion that there is one
problem and, by implication, therefore, one solution.”
44
Momaday analyzes the genocidal
violence of the “Pequot War” (1634-1638) as an example of a solution to the Indian
problem through “[t]he grim business of annihilation.”
45
For Momaday, the Pequot War

42. Ibid., 31. Momaday posits that the Spanish and French “New World colonies” offered collaborative
modes of domination that incorporated the Indian, through the impositions of feudalistic systems of serfdom
(Spanish) and trade (French)—arguments that Spaces of Violence seeks to reconsider. In contrast, Momaday asserts
that English colonialism had no use for the Indian, hence the emergence of the “Indian-hater” in colonial thought
and practice.

43. Momaday, “The Morality of Indian Hating,” 30.

44. Ibid., 32.

45. Ibid., Contextualizing the events, Momaday writes: “In 1637 the Pequods [sic] elected to defeat the rich
Connecticut Valley against the encroachment of white settlement...They were on the point of forming an alliance
with the Narragensetts when the recollection of an ancient enmities made them pause [their previous conflicts with
the Iroquois Confederacy]. Taking full advantage of the hesitation,” the English proceeded to slaughter the
“Pequods.” Momaday recounts the events: “the English moved swiftly against the Pequods in a campaign that
Mo’e’hahne 24
is significant in “symbolic terms” for “it represents a moral precedent upon which a
tradition of oppression has been based,” extermination. Momaday argues that this
tradition structures the morality of Indian hating into the colonial present. For instance,
through reading an early twentieth century white historian’s narration of Pequot
extermination, Momaday demonstrates how in the “same breath [the historian] deplores
and defends the morality” of the genocidal violence that was exacted because the
colonists feared the Indian, which surrounded the settlers like “a pack of hungry
wolves.”
46
The Indigenous are figured through signs of savage animality. It is, therefore,
the ideological work of Indigenous figuration that permits and sustains praxes of
Indigenous elimination as well as its many transtemporal, moral, and affective
dimensions in settler-colonial discourse. Discursive and material practices of Indian
hating, therefore, resemble what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling” in
which colonial common sense knowledge about Indigenous people constitute a practice
and process that is felt. Hegemonic forms of Indian hating are thus perceived as part of
the semantic field and affectively lived.
47

When Momaday published the essay, he was writing from within the Yaanga
orbit while he held a teaching post at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Momaday was also living in the spatial and temporal midst of the federal tribal

virtually exterminated the entire tribe. The colonists surprised the Indian stronghold at Fort Mystic and burned it to
the ground. In just more than an hour, some 600 Indians were shot or burned to death. The English lost two men in
the encounter...There began a relentless pursuit of the Pequod survivors. Homeless and grieving, they were easily
found and destroyed. The devastation of the Pequods was a triumph of the Puritan spirit. There was a celebration in
the New England towns, and the Reverend Cotton Mather called upon his congregation to thank God ‘that on this
day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to hell.’

46. Ibid., 32.

47. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 112, 128-130.
Mo’e’hahne 25
termination and relocation policies that followed the Second World War.
48
These shifts in
Indian policy included tribal termination, Public Law 280, and the relocation programs
(1945–1973). The relocation programs continued the logics of the nineteenth-century
regimes of forced relocation and the reservation system by seeking to assimilation and
de-indigenization Indigenous people by the ending of the federal trust responsibilities to
tribal nations and de-centralizing of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The policies of the era
were thus aimed at eliminating the Indian through assimilation, the legal liquidation of
Indian tribes and their lands, and urbanization.
49
For instance, one Southern California
Indigenous community member called tribal termination an “extermination program”
because settler state believed that “the Indians would be integrated by taking all the
youngsters off the reservation, the old would die off, the young would be integrated, and
the land would become free for public domain, and all the people could grab it.”
50

Termination and relocation policies represent one of the largest post-frontier formations
of what Lorenzo Veracini calls de-indigenization through “transfer.”
51
Los Angeles was

48. Having completed a doctorate at Stanford Momaday was also likely familiar with Indigenous
migrations and migrant communities in the urban spaces of (northern) California.

49. Through the result of intense lobbying, Present Eisenhower passed Public Law 280 on 15 August 1953
with the intent of “granting equity” to all Native people. In anticipation of the end of the trust responsibility to tribes
and the decentralization of the BIA, P.L. 280 was designed to transfer federal responsibilities of tribes to the state
governments. It authorized the states of California, Oregon, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin to exercise civil
and criminal jurisdiction over all Native lands and was thus a major undermining of tribal sovereignty for hundreds
of tribes. Termination also included releasing all tribal lands from federal trust, the end of all federal funding and
services (including education, healthcare, infrastructure, and government operation funding/services), the
extinguishing of tribal citizenship, and the removal of BIA supervision. Additionally, P.L. 280 stipulated that states
were to take over the administration of select Indian programs, including some relocation assistance. During the
1950s and 1960s, over 100 tribes were terminated and over 12,000 Indigenous people lost tribal citizenship. For
many policy makers, termination was framed as way to “uplift” American Indians by releasing them from the
paternalism of federal oversight and extending full American citizenship. See Donald L. Fixico, Termination and
Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986) 112.

50. Ibid., 149.

51. Ibid.; Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 33.

Mo’e’hahne 26
the location of the first Indian “relocation center.” In the winter of 1947, Indigenous
people living on the Navajo reservation were “airlifted” to Los Angeles because of
widespread starvation after the federal government killed their livestock, because the
non-human lives were reportedly threatening the local ecosystem. In the early nineteen
fifties, relocation was expanded across the United States, with relocation centers being
placed in most major cities. Through its nearly twenty years of operation, roughly thirty
thousand Indigenous people migrated to Los Angeles through the programs, with tens of
thousands more migrating without any assistance. Today, these migrants and their
descendants constitute the majority of the Indigenous people in the Yaanga region.
(Momaday would go on to engage these Indigenous subjectivities and migration
experiences in the novel House Made of Dawn, published four years after the essay.
Portions of the novel are set in downtown Los Angeles in 1952.
52
) Reflecting on these
colonial formations of Indigenous dispossession, migration, and urbanization in “The
Morality of Indian Hating,” Momaday concludes that, in the era of termination and
relocation, “[s]uperficially, a witch-burning psychology had given way to an age of
philanthropy...The morality of intolerance has become in the twentieth century a morality
of pity.”
53
Settler-colonial apprehensions of the Indigenous, whether through cascading
eliminatory violence or benevolent pity, are, therefore, defined by a “morality of Indian
hating.”
Rayna Green’s scholarship has been foundational to American Indian studies and
Indigenous feminist theory by illustrating how everyday settler cultures conjure and

52. N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn.1968 (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1999).

53. Momaday, “The Morality of Indian Hating,” 36.

Mo’e’hahne 27
abject Indigenous figures. In “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America
and Europe,” Green establishes the centrality of affect in colonial praxes of performing
Indianness. Green writes, “[o]ne of the oldest and most pervasive forms of American
cultural expression, indeed one of the oldest forms of affinity with American culture at
the national level, is a ‘performance’ [she] call[s] ‘playing Indian.’”
54
Like Momaday,
Green links the ability of non-Indigenous people to selectively embody and perform
Indianness to colonial structures of feeling:
[T]he living performance of ‘playing Indian’ by non-Indian peoples depends upon
the physical and psychological removal, even the death, of real Indians. In that
sense, the performance, purportedly often done out of a stated and implicit love
for Indians, is really the obverse of another well-known cultural phenomenon,
‘Indian hating,’ as most often expressed in another, deadly performance genre
called ‘genocide’ [emphasis added]
55

Settler-colonial structures of feeling thus permit playing Indian. The circulations of
Indian “love” and “hate” facilitate Indian play by forming what Sarah Ahmed theorizes
as an “affective economy.”
56
Indigenous death is ideologically and materially necessary
to present non-native subjects with the opportunity to perform and embody Indianness.
Analyzing historical and twentieth century forms of Indian play, Green writes that
playing Indian occurs “across a range of media from traditional, orally transmitted texts
(songs, stories, jokes, anecdotes) to formal literary texts, to artifacts (clothing, toys, tools,
drawings, paintings), to dramatic performances (games, gestures, dramas) and ritual

54. Rayna Green, “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe.” Folklore 99, no.
1 (1988), 30.

55. Ibid., 31.

56. Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2004. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 44-45.

Mo’e’hahne 28
enactments or reenactments.”
57
Green also argues that Indian play transcends racial,
gendered, classed, and national boundaries and has become a global phenomenon. Indian
play, according to Green, is also central to defining American national cultures and
characters.
Philip Deloria and Shari Huhndorf have connected settler praxes of becoming
Indian to specific white masculine and heteronormative colonial affects. Philip Deloria
writes that throughout the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, white men
formed back-to-nature Indian hobbyist “tribes” to resolve anxieties as about whiteness,
modernity, and masculinity.
58
Similarly, Shari Huhndorf theorizes “going native” as an
embodied and affective practice that is distinct from temporarily playing Indian.
According to Huhndorf, going native names practices whereby an often white, cisgender,
male subject abandons the “colonial world” for that of “the Native.” Going native thus
“attempts to resolve ambivalence[s] about modernity as well as anxieties about” anti-
Indigenous violence while serving as “an essential means of defining and regenerating
racial whiteness.”
59
According to Huhndorf, over the past century, “going native has
become a cherished American tradition and an important—often necessary—means of
defining” colonial identities and histories.
60
Through representational and embodied

57. Green, “The Tribe Called Wannabee,” 30.

58. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

59. Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2001) 2-5.

60. Ibid.

Mo’e’hahne 29
colonial figurations, Indianness can, therefore, become a malleable and transient cultural
form and a means of non-native racial shape-shifting.
“If colonialism has forced the native to ‘cathect the space of the Other on his
home ground’ as Spivak tells us, then imperialism has forced settlers and arrivants to
cathect the space of the native as their home.”
61
Further connecting Indian significations
and affect to colonial biopolitics, in The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of
Colonialism, Jodi Byrd argues that “Indianness” functions “as site of transit through
which U.S. empire replicates itself by transforming those to be colonized into
‘Indians.’”
62
According to Byrd, this transit, “suggests [that] multiple subjectivities and
subjugations [can be]…made to move through notions of injury…and grievability as the
United States deploys a paradigmatic Indianness to facilitate its imperial desire.”
63
Such
deployments, however, circulate Indianness “as both a sign and event…that starts, stops,
and reboots colonialist discourses that spread along lines of flight” [emphasis added].
64

Indianness, therefore, becomes available to any subject enmeshed in regimes of colonial
common sense. It can be resignified or traversed as a means of registering “grievances”
with the settler state or channeling desires to transcend one’s subject position through an
“affective Indianness.”
65
Through what Jacques Derrida theorizes as “free play,”
66

61. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxxix; Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:
Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 211, citied in Byrd.

62. Ibid., xxi.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 221.

65. Ibid., 221, 36.

66. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and
Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 281.

Mo’e’hahne 30
Indigenous/Indian signs can therefore be endlessly resignified through infinite deferrals
of meaning. Through settler-colonial epistemes of violence, the Indian can thus exist as
the object and liminal subject to be obliterated as well as the affectively oriented space of
settler-colonial identification and belonging, as Green, Deloria, and have Huhndorf
theorized.
While Derrida’s poststructuralist theorizations can be used to read the violences
of Indigenous signification and figuration (through a violet form of “free play” that I
analyze throughout Spaces of Violence), one of Jodi Byrd’s most crucial contributions to
Indigenous critical theory is revealing the programmatic and paradigmatic Indianness that
is imbedded in poststructural thought. For example, Byrd reads a quote from Gustave
Flaubert that opens Derrida’s essay “Force and Signification”: “It might be that we are all
tattooed savages since Sophocles...”
67
Byrd asks what is the function of the tattooed
savages in Derrida’s program of radical deconstruction? “The presence of the quote at the
beginning of Derrida’s text,” Byrd writes, in fact, “signifies a priori the idea of the savage
and the ‘Indian’ that serves as the ground and pre-condition for structuralism and
formalism, as well as their posts-.”
68
The imagined Indigenous thus constitutes the pre-
structuralist and pre-Enlightenment liminal subject against which European
Enlightenment ontologies and their “posts” are defined. Byrd continues:
But the function of the “tattooed savages after Sophocles” is more than just myth making
and more than proof of the lie of inclusion. The presence of the quote at the begging of
Derrida’s text signifies a priori the idea of the savage and the “Indian” supplements

67. Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification,” in Writing and Difference, 3; Byrd, The Transit of Empire,
7.

68. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 10.

Mo’e’hahne 31
persist as a trace, and become an undeconstructable core within critical theories that
attempt to dismantle how knowledge, power, and language function [emphasis added].
69

The function of savage/Indian is twofold. The savage/Indian is figured as the
“undeconstructable” non-subject that haunts the core of Euroamerican critical theory and
Continental philosophy’s attempts to disentangle how systems of knowledge-power take root via
language. The savage/Indian also represents the primal state of the human that the liberal
Enlightenment subject and analyst must have already transcended in order to become what
Denise da Silva calls a “self-determining transparent full subject.”
70
Even as the Enlightenment
subject transits the savage/Indian, the Indigenous remains as a trace through what Derrida calls
“supplementarity,” that which is placed outside of the sign, in this case, the formalism of
Enlightenment language that poststructuralism seeks to expose and transcend. Through this
program of deconstruction, Byrd argues, Derrida also attempts to incorporate that savage/Indian
into the corpus of Euroamerican critical theory by transiting the figure of the Indigenous. “This
notion of becoming savage” represents what Byrd calls “the transit of empire,” as the Indian
becomes a site through which “the United States, with ties to Enlightenment and Victorian
colonialisms, propagates itself through a paradigmatic ‘Indianness’ tied now to the global
ascendency of liberalism.”
71
Byrd argues that as these theories and political orientations traverse
languages, disciplines, and continents—from the Francophone imperial metropole to the
Americas and back again—the traces of the Indian follow the emancipatory Deleuzian “lines of
flight” that colonialist thought conjures through Indigenous figurations.

69. Ibid.

70. da Silva. Toward A Global Idea of Race.

71. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 10.

Mo’e’hahne 32
To further illustrate transitable Indians as an emancipatory “line of flight,” Byrd turns to
another archive of poststructuralist imagining that, as she crucially points out, has become
“ascendant” in diasporic studies, critical race studies, and queer studies: Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In A Thousand Plateaus,
Deleuze and Guattari reformulate Derrida’s fixation on the verb “to be” by adding an additional
chain: “and...and...and.”
72
Byrd writes that Deleuze and Guattari marshal the discursive potential
of this iteration to “map” an infinite subjectivity onto the spaces of North America through
embodied spatial possibilities. These formulations are used to produce the escapist “lines of
flight” that Deleuze and Guattari conjure out of the “de/re/territorializations” of occupied
Indigenous homelands. For instance, they fetishize the imagined spatiality of the “rhizome” as
the “flattening and smoothing plateaus” of an imaged North American West. Deleuze and
Guattari figure the rhizomes of the West as the spaces of “nomadic assemblages,” which they
can inhabit by transiting the Indian. For example, reading Leslie Fielder’s The Return of the
Vanishing American, Deleuze and Guattari re/map North America:
America is a special case...directions are different...But there is the rhizomatic West, with
its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers.
There is a whole map American “map” in the West...America reversed directions...it puts
its Orient in the West...
73

The West becomes the Orient of the East. The “Indians without ancestry” are disposable and
their subject positions are open to be inhabited by anyone. According to Byrd, Deleuze and
Guattari “re/deterritorialize America as the world, coming full circle to find its west in its easts, a

72. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 98.

73. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 19; Leslie Fielder, The Return of the Vanishing American
(New York: Stein and Day, 1968).

Mo’e’hahne 33
worlding anew...that decenters all static, grounded belongings and locates them instead in
becomings: becoming-Indian, becoming-woman, becoming-America.”
74
Deleuze and Guattari
figuratively empty the lands of their Indigenous inhabitants, thus imagining settler-colonial
logics of elimination as a form of spatialized emancipatory politics.
75
Through the infinite
possibilities of becoming, the Indigenous are rendered as liminal subjects, the constitutive
outside of settler subjectivity to be exterminated, replaced, and transited across the spaces, times,
and discourses of Euroamerican colonial—and nominally leftist—political praxes and
poststructuralist thought. One of my objectives throughout Spaces of Violence is to demonstrate
how poststructuralist thought, through Derrida’s frameworks specifically, while premised on
Indigenous abjection (as the constitutive outside of the Euroamerican settler and European
enlightenment subject), paradoxically offers theoretical insight into how the violent epistemes of
Indigeneity function discursively in the colonial cultures of Los Angeles.

Urban Settler-Colonial Occupation

Spaces of Violence analyzes the past and present dialectics of violence in spaces that are
normatively rendered as “urban,” “multiracial,” “multiethnic” and, therefore, punitively non-
Indigenous in academic, popular, and settler-state discourses. In The White Possessive: Property,
Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that the regimes of

74. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 13.

75. Byrd concludes that in poststructuralist thought, “as a philosophical sign, the Indian is the transit, the
field through which presignifying polyvocality is re/introduced into the signifying regime, and signs begin to
proliferate through a series of becomings—becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-Indian, becoming-
multiplicity—that serves all regimes of sign.” Ibid., 19.

Mo’e’hahne 34
governmentality and land tenure created by white racial hegemonies in the Anglophone settler
colonies of the North America and the Pacific (the United States, Canada, Hawaiʻi, Australia,
and Aotearoa/New Zealand) rest on the possessive logics of “patriarchal white sovereignty.”
76

Through formulations of terra nullius, coupled with tropes that render Indigenous peoples as less
than human or non-human, colonial possessive logics view Indigenous lands as always already
the rightful possessions of the white colonizing bios. Reformulating George Lipsitz’s
theorization of the omnipresent and yet invisible structures of whiteness, Moreton-Robinson
writes that “[f]or Indigenous people, white possession is not unmarked, unnamed, or invisible;
[instead] it is ‘hypervisible’” [emphasis added], especially in urbanized spaces. Moreton-
Robinson continues:
In our quotidian encounters, whether it is on the streets of Otago or Sydney, in the tourist
shops in Vancouver or Waipahu, or sitting in a restaurant in New York, we experience
ontologically the effects of white possession. These cities signify with every building and
every street that this land is now possessed by others; signs of white possession are
embedded everywhere in the landscape. The omnipresence of Indigenous sovereignties
exists here too, but it is disavowed through the materiality of these significations, which
are perceived as evidence of ownership by those who have taken possession.
77

The settler-colonial city, as Moreton-Robinson illustrates, signifies “with every building and
every street that this land is now possessed by others.” The logics of settler possession, created
through patriarchal whiteness, are ever present to Indigenous peoples living under colonial
occupation; for all space in the Americans is Indigenous space. The colonial city is an exemplar
of settler-colonial possession. Urban settler logics continually dispossess Indigenous peoples
whose homelands are occupied by urban and suburban colonialisms, such as the Gabrielino-

76. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xiii.

77. Ibid.

Mo’e’hahne 35
Tongva and Fernandeño Tatavium of Los Angeles and the Lenape/Delaware of Manna-
Hata/New York City.
78
Moreton-Robison contends that Indigenous relationships to the land and
sovereignties are also always present but they are continually “disavowed” through logics of
colonial possession. Moreton-Robison writes that the logics of Indigenous dispossession,
expressed as racial, gendered, and spatial violence towards Indigenous people, come to structure
all colonizing relationships to Native lands. Arguing for increased transdisciplinary
conversations between critical Indigenous studies and critical race studies, Moreton-Robinson
writes that “[r]acism is thus inextricably tied to the theft and appropriation of Indigenous lands,”
in fact, the existence of racial regimes in the “United States, Canada, Australia, Hawaiʻi, and
New Zealand is dependent on Indigenous dispossession.”
79
The historical and contemporary
processes that, for instrance, produce some subjects as white and other as black, Moreton-
Robinson contends, depend on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The political
economies of place and everyday occupation that arise from Los Angeles settler colonialism,
therefore, apprehend and naturalize Indigenous homelands as potential commodified possessions,
in the form of dwellings, sites of commerce, and the annals of settler-colonial governmentality
(which although actively target racialized, non-Indigenous socialities through carceral
articulations of state necropower, they also possessively function on the behalf of the colonizing
sovereign as possessions of the settler polis and bios itself).
80
The “signs of white possession are
embedded everywhere in the landscape,” however, in the racially diverse settler-colonial spaces

78. Joanne Barker, “In Debt: A Reconsideration of ‘Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime’ from
Manna-Hata,” paper presented at Indigeneity and Decolonization Research Cluster, Department of American
Studies and Ethnicity, February 27, 2014.

79. Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive, xii.

80. For a reading of Foucault’s “governmentality” as diffusely operating on the behalf of the sovereign see
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 94-96.

Mo’e’hahne 36
of Los Angeles and its suburbs, the regimes of settler possession have been decoupled from the
exclusivity of whiteness. Therefore, Spaces of Violences argues that since their inception in the
eighteenth century, Los Angeles spatial and biopolitical settler-colonial praxes have been
multiracial.

Settler Common Sense and the Spatiality of Los Angeles
Echoing Moreton-Robinson’s analysis of colonial possession, Mark Rifkin argues that
through settler common sense “the ways [that] the legal and political structures” normatively
function “enable nonnative access to Indigenous territories.” Through settler common sense
settler access to Indigenous homelands “come to be lived…as simply the unmarked, generic
conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history and personhood.”
81
Rifkin argues
that settler common sense produces everyday ways of seeing and feeling that “normalize settler
presence, privilege, and power” on occupied Indigenous lands. According to Rifkin, settler
common sense operates with or without the presence of or explicit reference to Indigenous
people. “The fact that there is not, or I do not perceive there to be an active political struggle
over the place I inhabit,” Rifkin writes, “does not mean it and my apprehension of [the land]
somehow exist outside or beyond ongoing histories of settler-Indigenous negotiation,
antagonism, and conflict.”
82
The very sites and spaces that non-natives become oriented towards
carry the traces of colonization and ongoing occupation, however, such conflicts are often
naturalized and obscured through settler common sense.

81. Rifkin, Mark. Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American
Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xvi.

82. Ibid.

Mo’e’hahne 37
Los Angeles County is the second most populous metropolitan area in the United States,
with rough ten million inhabitants (the population is approximately sixteen million when San
Bernardino and Orange counties are included).
83
Los Angeles County is among the most racially
diverse spaces in North America. Numerous histories and sociologies of race, place, and the
political economy have been generated through reading the spatial and biopolitical formations of
the Los Angeles region. For instance, there is an emerging archive of studies of race and
migration in the San Gabriel Valley. Many of these texts, however, fail to analyze colonialism as
a distinct mode of domination or engage Indigenous peoples, past or present, in their
formulations of race, politics, and space.
84
After New York City, Los Angeles County also has
the second largest population of Indigenous people in United States, two hundred thousand by
some estimates.
85
The majority of the region’s Native American population, however, are
Indigenous migrants and the descendants of migrants, who, following the shifts in federal Indian
policy after Second World, migrated to urbanized spaces.
86
Kim Robertson argues that “non-

83. United States Census Bureau, “Quick Facts,” accessed April 14, 2017,
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045216/06071,06059,06037.

84. For instance, see Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican
American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles,1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995); Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic
Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight:
Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Timothy Fong, The
First Suburban Chinatown: The Remarking of Monterey Park, California (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1994); Mary S. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles
Communities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

85. Paul M. Ong, Douglas Houston, Jennifer Wang, and Jordan Rickles, “Socioeconomic Characteristics of
American Indians in Los Angeles County,” The Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Community Service Projects/Papers (University of California, Los Angeles, 25 November 2002). Accessed 20
August 2010, http://repositories.cdlib.org/lewis/cspp/10.

86. Larry W. Burt, “Roots of the Native American Urban Experience: Relocation Policy of the 1050s.”
American Indian Quarterly 10 (1986):85-99; Susan Lobo, Urban Voices: The Bay Area American Indian
Community (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002); Matthew C. Snipp, American Indians: The First of This
Mo’e’hahne 38
reservation” spaces, primarily urban and suburban geographies, are constructed as normatively
non-Indigenous by settler common sense knowledges, colonial legal regimes, and cultural
practices
87
—as the Gabrielino-Tongva and Fernandeño Tatavium’s tribal recognition statuses
illustrate. According to Robertson, when Indigenous people occupy or enter spaces mapped as
non-reservation by the settler state, they are legally and biopolitically rendered non-Indigenous
and, therefore, come to inhabit even more precarious subject positions defined by colonial
violence, especially Indigenous women.
The spatial turn in Euroamerican academic discourses also normatively apprehends space
in ways that naturalize settler-colonial occupation. These discourses espouse programs aimed at
democratizing spatial politics, especially urban space, rather than decolonizing the settler-
colonial order. Some of the key texts that helped usher in the so-called spatial turn in
Euroamerican social and cultural inquiry have also been produced by reading the spatial archives
of Los Angeles settler colonialism. Many of these studies, however, utilize Marxian frameworks
where capital and the political economy are the primary vectors of power and thus fail to analyze
settler colonialism and its possessive logics as the primary structures that order the political
economy and create raced, sexed, and gendered forms difference. For example, in Postmodern
Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Edward Soja analyzes Los
Angeles as a spatial iconography of late capitalism. According to Soja, post-Fordist capital has
morphed through “geographically uneven developments” between metropolitan and periphery

Land (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989); Renya K. Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and
Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

87. Kimberly Robertson, Un-Settling Questions: The Construction of Indigeneity and Violence Against
Native Women, (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2012).

Mo’e’hahne 39
spaces (the rural and urban, or global north and global south), globalized circuits of capital and
labor, and speculative markets.
88
Critiquing and yet reveling in the “postmodernity” of Los
Angeles, Soja writes: “seemingly paradoxical but functionally interdependent juxtapositions are
the epitomizing features of contemporary Los Angeles.” Soja also sees multiple geographies
reflected in the complex political economies of Los Angeles settler colonialism:
One can find in Los Angeles not only the high technology industrial complexes of the
Silicon Valley and the erratic sunbelt economy of Houston, but also the far-reaching
industrial decline and bankrupt urban neighbourhoods of rust-belted Detroit or Cleveland.
There is a Boston in Los Angeles, a lower Manhattan and a South Bronx, a Sao Paulo and
a Singapore.
89

In looking for political-economic parity, Soja perceives occupied Indigenous homelands as
forever discursively and spatially fungible, one (global) location can be read into it, then another,
and another. The telos of his spatial reasoning is that one spatial form can be replaced with
another, and then another. He reproduces what Jodi Byrd identifies as another epistemic violence
created by poststructuralist thought: the denial of an original or an originary social or spatial
form in the Americas.
90
Soja’s spatial theorizations, in fact, mirror the continual re/production of
spatial forms that characterize urban settler colonialism: one building replacing another and each
repetition actively replaces the Indigenous socialities whose homelands it occupies. Soja’s
formulations represent a settler-colonial fetishization of (urban) space that effectively transforms

88. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London:
Verso, 1989), 163.

89. Ibid. For Soja, capital rather than settler colonialism created contemporary Los Angeles, as he contends
that Los Angeles was “a small periphery outpost” for a century after it was founded.

90. Jodi Byrd, “asserts that there must be the possibility of the originary in the new world, and that it is
located within the historical experiences of new world colonizations, genocides, and violences. There is a long line
of continuity between the past and the present that has not been disrupted despite the fact that the stories we tell may
or may not acknowledge that continuity.” Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xiii-xiv.

Mo’e’hahne 40
the spaces of Los Angeles in to a “rhizomatic” West. For Soja, Los Angeles is Silicon Valley,
Houston, Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, or São Paulo, or as Deleuze and Guattari write
“and…and…and…”
91
Los Angeles becomes a colonial space of potential becomings. Like
Deleuze and Guattari, Soja as “de/re/territorializes” Yaanga/Los Angeles and see easts in the
west: the east coasts of North America, the east of Europe, the southeasts of the Americas (both
north and south). In ways that reflect an absurd, settler, urban sublime, Soja also reads the waves
of “postmodern” urban redevelopment that have remade downtown Los Angeles through the
prism of the Bonaventure Hotel:
The Bonaventure Hotel, an amazingly storeyed architectural symbol of the splintered
labyrinth that stretches sixty miles around it...The Bonaventure has become a
concentrated representation of the restructured spatiality of the late capitalist city...
seemingly open in presenting itself to view but constantly pressing to enclose, to
compartmentalize, to circumscribe, to incarcerate... everything imaginable appears to be
available in this micro-urb [sic] but real places are difficult to find...its spaces confuse
effective cognitive mapping ... and encourage submission instead...entrance is
encouraged at many different levels...once inside however it becomes daunting to get out
again.
92

For Soja, the Bonaventure is an “architectural symbol of the splintered labyrinth” of Los
Angeles. The hotel, like the city, works to “compartmentalize, to circumscribe, to incarcerate.”
But who are these forms circumscribing and incarcerating? For Soja, there is a spatial free play
of imagined and sought after “real” spaces in Los Angeles and the hotel. Soja revels in the
iconographies of the “post” of a modern liberal Enlightenment subjectivity and project that was
never extended to the Gabrielino-Tongva, Fernandeño Tatavium, or the thousands of Indigenous
migrants brought to the settler cosmopole through eliminatory settler biopolitics. To borrow from

91. Ibid., 11; Alex Trimble Young, “Settler Sovereignty and The Rhizomatic West, or, The Significance of
the Frontier in Postwestern Studies,” Western American Literature 48 no. 1 & 2 (2013):115-140.

92. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 244.

Mo’e’hahne 41
Clifford Geertz, Soja weaves postmodern “webs of [spatial] significance”
93
out of the colonial
structures which, in his words, “encourage submission” and work to enclose. However, the very
spaces Soja reads and the phenomenologies he inhabits to perceive them are the product of
naturalized and ongoing settler-colonial “enclosures” of Indigenous lifeworlds. Furthermore, as
Stuart Hall has pointed out, “postmodernism” is in “essence a devastating story” about the failure
of the “Enlightenment project,” the machinations of late capital, and “American culture.”
However, in Euroamerican (intellectual) discourse, Hall contends postmodernism becomes a
celebration of “American culture” and “how the world dreams itself to be “American.”
94
Soja’s
postmodernism becomes a celebration of American settler spatial cultures in all their wonder and
horror. However, it is a celebration that must never recon with the horrors that produced the
initial colonial relations of space through Indigenous dispossession and that continue to structure
all lives in occupied Yaanga. As Patrick Wolfe observes, under settler-colonial occupation,
“[l]and is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.” According to Wolfe, “contests for land,”
therefore, can become “contests for life.”
95
As such, Soja’s spatial soliloquies discursively erase
both past and present Indigenous presences.
96

93. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” In Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures, (New York: Perseus, 1973), 5.

94. Lawrence Grossberg, eds., “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,”
Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10 no. 2 (Summer 1986), 45-46. Furthermore, as Hall points out, for many
colonized, postcolonial, and subjected peoples and geographies, the “modern”—that is, the Enlightenment project,
or as sociologist Denise da Silva has theorized, Enlightenment status of full subjecthood—never arrived. See also da
Silva, Toward A Global Idea of Race.

95. Patrick Wolfe “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research
8, no. 4 (2006): 387.

96. Soja has continued to propose that geography is a primary field of emancipatory politics and social
justice. In Seeking Spatial Justice Soja begins to look at and theorize colonial contexts, however they are not settler
colonies in the Anglophone Global North and Pacific, rather the colonies and “postcolonies,” as Achille Mbembe
identifies them, in the Americas and Asia. David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity also features analytical
episodes reflect the spaces of downtown Los Angeles, along with other spaces of the Global North carved out of
Mo’e’hahne 42
Questions of who gets excluded and enclosed loom large in normative spatial analyses of
the settler-colonial city, where colonialism is often unacknowledged. Thinking through and
alongside sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the “right to the city,”
97
generations of white,
male spatial analysts in the global north and the US colony, such as Edward Soja, David Harvey,
and the decades of interlocutors that have followed, have contended that emancipatory politics
can only be realized through the democratization of space. Indigenous critical theory, however,
asks: whose city and whose right? Settlers, migrants, or the Indigenous? For example, in City of
Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis describes the downtown Los Angeles
of the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties as a “fortress.” Reflecting on some of the
same spatial programs as Soja, Davis contends that a “new class war” is being waged “at the
level of the built environment.” This spatial war, according to Davis, takes the form of a
“crusade to secure the city and the destruction of accessible public space” through its
privatization.
98
These spatial transformations accompanied so-called new articulations of
sovereign-state power through policing, which resulted from “the middle-class demand for
increased spatial and social insulation.”
99
According to Davis, the net outcome is a “massively

occupied North America. My use of “postcolony” comes from Achille Mbembe’s theorization of the “postcolony,”
not as a temporal and spatial form that occupied a “post” within a colonial teolos, but rather as that which exists as a
collection of institutional, geopolitical, and biopolitical forms that are still structured by colonial relations of power
and political logics of recognition and governmentality that unfold in relation to the colonizer/the colonial
metropole. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). See Soja,
Edward. Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010; David Harvey, The Condition
of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989).

97. Henri Lefebvre, Writing on Cities. Trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell,
1996), 147-159.

98. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990), 228, 226.

99. Ibid., 227, 230.

Mo’e’hahne 43
reproduced spatial apartheid.”
100
Patrick Wolfe argues that settler-colonial expansion and the
logic of elimination are often misread as the work mere capitalism, or, in this case, racialized
capitalism.
101
However, what Aileen Moreton-Robinson demonstrates and what Mike Davis’s
readings elide is that the settler-colonial city has always been a spatial apartheid and a fortress
outpost where Indigenous dispossession, colonial occupation, and privatization are inscribed in
the very landscape (carved out of occupied Indigenous homelands). Rather than reading the
articulations of state power perfected by Los Angeles policing during the mid to late twentieth
century (through the targeting of non-white bodies and communities and the increased
privatization of occupied Indigenous homelands) as novel formations of violence, Indigenous
critical theory and settler colonial studies reveal that carcerality and privatization are the modus
operandi of the settler colony. Furthermore, as Achille Mbembe observes, in the colony,
securing the peace, or what is normatively constructed as “policing,” more often becomes a “war
without end.”
102

As normative geographies of Los Angeles demonstrate, there are layers of colonial
common sense structuring the colonization of Yaanga and its narrations in academic and public
signification. Throughout Spaces of Violence, I read texts from the emerging discourses of what
can be called critical race geography, specifically those focused on the Los Angeles region.
These texts illustrate how critical race theorizations in the United States engage both spatiality
and settler colonialism. Scholars such as Timothy Fong and Leland Saito have demonstrated the
persistence of racialized hierarchies and regimes of othering in the suburban spaces of Los

100. Ibid., 230.

101. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and The Transformation of Anthropology, 167.

102. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15, no 1 (2003), 23.
Mo’e’hahne 44
Angeles. However, while noting the ongoing forms racial exclusion from racial whiteness,
emerging social and cultural geographies of suburban Los Angeles also emphasize the counter
hegemonic potential of the non-white and queer, suburban spatial praxes. For example, Karen
Tongson argues for the disruptive potential that non-white and queer of color suburban
migrations hold. For instance, Tongson reads the film Next Friday (1999), where
African/American and Mexican/American characters from Los Angeles relocate to the suburbs
and encounter equal amounts of racialized conflict and hi-jinx. For Tongson, however, these
migrations work to queer suburban Los Angeles whiteness. This reading thus naturalizes the
colonial logics of possession and Indigenous replacement that permit white, of color, and queer
of color suburban “relocations.”
103
Here, the (suburban) spaces carved out of Indigenous
homelands are again read as fungible: one spatial form and racialized “bio-history”
104
can be
replaced by another, and another.

Temporality, Indigenous Critical Theory, and Race
Throughout Spaces of Violence, I practice a sociology that is attuned to past formations
of violence as well as their contemporary and transtemporal iterations in material,
representational, and practiced culture. I use transtemporal to name social formations that move
between and across temporalities and do not easily fit into categorizations of the past or present.
In this way, the study of colonial culture proceeds dialectally as present social formations are
analyzed in relation to “past” practices of violence and their after/lives—some having never

103. Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York University Press,
2011), 33-34.

104. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 143.

Mo’e’hahne 45
ended.
105
In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, critical Indigenous
scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith asserts that, “Coming to know the past has been part of the critical
pedagogy of decolonization.”
106
Smith continues:
To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges. The pedagogical
implication of this access to alternative knowledge is that they can form the basis of
alternative ways of doing things. Transforming our colonized views of our own history
(as written by the West), however, requires us to revisit, site by site, our history under
western eyes. This in turn requires a theory or approach, which helps us to engage with,
understand and then act upon history [emphasis added].
107

In Spaces of Violence, I offer alternative engagements with the colonial past and the colonial
present by visiting, site by site, spaces of ongoing Indigenous abjection in order to reveal the
layers of violence that are materially inflicted on Indigenous socialities. My goal is to reveal the
epistemic violences that constitute the everyday practices of Los Angeles settler society in the
hope that these practices can be undone and that alternative ways of living can be realized.
Writing of the Mapuche lifeworlds that defy the boundaries imposed by South American nation-
state postcolonies but are nonetheless subjected to multiple and overlapping violences of
occupation and extraction, Macarena Gómez-Barris argues that such chains of brutality represent
a “continuum of colonization.”
108
This colonial continuum works to “unequally structure both

105. This approach resembles forms of historically grounded cultural studies, articulated by thinkers such
as Raymond Williams, where the realms of representation and the workings of ideology cannot be analyzed
separately from the material conditions that “produce” them. However, I seek to depart from the dialects of
historical materialism—for instance that maintain teleological, Marxian co-determinations of “base,”
“superstructure,” and “culture”—and instead offer an account of cultures of violence that simultaneously mirror,
reproduce, and transcend the material conditions in which they take shape. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Christopher Prendergast ed. Cultural Materialism: On
Raymond Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

106. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed
Books, 1999), 34.

107. Ibid.

108. Gómez-Barris, “Mapuche Mnemonics,” 91.

Mo’e’hahne 46
relations between humans and relations between humans and other species” into the colonial
present.
109
Gómez-Barris identifies the “past-present” as both a socio-temporal phenomenon and
an analytical framework that “indexes” the often “unaccounted-for [and unacknowledged]
discursive and material violence[s]” that characterize colonial occupation.
110
As a frame of
analysis, the past-present names the temporal and social enjambments that arise when past
violences “bleed” into the present.
111
These social and temporal enjambments resemble what
Elizabeth Freeman calls “queer temporalities,” where time is not apprehended as having a
straight forward moving telos, but rather temporality unfolds through arcs where sedimentations
of the social are collected in spaces, bodies, and cultures.
112
By following how Indigenous
figurations appear in the continuum of Los Angeles colonization and under what conditions of
violence, duress, and social reproduction, I seek to uncover the past-present forms of anti-
Indigenous violence that are woven into the social fabric of Los Angeles culture.
Spaces of Violence also listens to the Indigenous voices that have come forward to speak
on their terms within the public cultures of Los Angeles. I work to shift discourses away from
directly re-presenting Indigenous socialities as a method of critiquing colonialism. Such
discursive practices can re/create academically contained “archives” of Indigenous socialities
and Indigenous knowledges, which, as Jacques Derrida theorizes, represent their own methods of

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., 90.

111. My use of the term “bleed” is inspired by Jodi Byrd’s theorization in the Transit of Empire, xxviii.

112. Freeman, Elizabeth, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010).

Mo’e’hahne 47
containment.
113
Instead, I deconstruct how hegemonic cultural and knowledge systems function
through representing the figure of the Indigenous as a means to displace Indigenous people. I
practice the politics of what Audra Simpson calls “ethnographic refusal.”
114
This “war of
position”
115
does not seek the “recognition”
116
of Indigenous socialities and voices by the settler
state, its “ideological apparatuses,”
117
or the academic webs of signification. Spaces of Violence,
instead, undertakes what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls critical Indigenous theorizing in order
to analyze the ways in which Gabrielino-Tongva and Fernandeño Tatavium subject positions and
the relations of Indigenous abjection function as the absent center of Los Angeles settler-colonial
society.
118
For as Moreton-Robinson contends, who is better positioned to critique colonial
modes of domination than Indigenous peoples.
In Theorizing Native Studies, Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith argue that since its
inception, Native American and American Indian studies have sought to target and dismantle
what constituted “truth” within the Euroamerican “grand narratives” and “systems of thought.”
They observe that these objectives are exemplified by the work of scholars like Vine Deloria Jr.

113. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996), 2.

114. Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures
9, (2007), 69-74.

115. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.

116 Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

117. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism.

118. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Introduction: locations of engagement in the First World” in eds. Aileen
Moreton-Robinson, Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2016), 3-18.

Mo’e’hahne 48
and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn.
119
Simpson and Smith argue that because much contemporary
theorizing in Native studies is political but is no longer focused on settler-state recognitions,
“coalition building” remains a critical avenue for working towards decolonization.
120
This
coalition building requires looking outside of Indigenous studies discourses and, inspired by
Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s powerful œuvré, I would add analyzing social forms beyond
Indigenous subject positions. Analyzing the cultural practices of everyday settler society can
expose the ways that settler-colonial power disciplines and orients all white and non-white
subjects living in the United States settler colony. For example, analyzing the multiracial and
multiethnic colonial occupation of the Hawaiʻian archipelago, Indigenous theorist Huanani-Kay
Trask contends that the non-white and non-native populations that occupy Indigenous Hawaiʻian
homelands represent “settlers” rather than “immigrants.”
121
For Trask, settlerism is not
exclusively practiced by subjects that are racialized as white. For instance, Trask writes that
“Native people and territories have been overrun by non-Natives, including Asians…”
According to Trask, as non-Indigenous socialities “claim Hawai‘i as their own [they deny]
indigenous history.”
122
Trask argues that all non-native colonial interlocutors represent settlers
because of the ways that both whites and non-whites benefit from the ongoing colonization of
Indigenous lands and life, or as Trask writes, “their long collaboration in our continued

119. Simpson and Smith argue that because Indigenous studies is not bounded to any disciplinary mode of
inquiry, it is also not bounded to any theoretical regime. Therefore, Natives studies is inherently transdisciplinary
and oriented by multiple theoretical forms. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, “Introduction” in Audra Simpson and
Andrea Smith eds. Theorizing Native Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014),10-13.

120. Ibid., 9.

121. Huanani-Kay Trask, “Settlers, Not Immigrants,” in eds. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura
Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habbits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi. Honolulu:
University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008), vii.

122. Huanani-Kay Trask, “Settlers of Color and Immigrant Hegemony,”46.

Mo’e’hahne 49
dispossession.”
123
Trask demonstrates that such settling socialities work to materially and
discursively inscribe themselves on the occupied Indigenous homelands.

According to Trask, the
“settlers of color” in Hawaiʻi craft forms of hegemony that seek to replace Indigenous peoples by
positioning themselves as the true “locals.”
124

Following Trask, Spaces of Violence analyzes the complex relations of colonial power,
hegemony, and racialization and the structures of belonging that are produced by the ongoing
colonization of the Yaanga/Los Angeles region. Scott Lauria Morgensen explains that, in fact,
“non-native” does not signify a “racial or ethnic identity but [rather] a location within settler
colonialism.”
125
According to Morgensen, settler-colonial projects work to “amalgamate subjects
into settler society as non-native ‘inheritors’ and not challengers of the colonization of Native
peoples on occupied Indigenous lands.”
126
In this way, “settler” identifies a location within
colonial power systems. As the sites of racially diverse settler populations that are actively
engaged in the colonization of Indigenous life and land, there are biopolitical and spatial parities
between the occupied Native homelands of Hawaiʻi and Yaanga. However, the degrees and
configurations of non-white hegemony differ and have shifted over time, which I explore further
in chapter one. Nevertheless, the relations of Indigenous replacement and the “indigenization” of
the non-native populations remain the guiding telos of both settler-colonial formations. Spaces of
Violence thus contends that understanding how the matrices of colonial violence are produced in
non-native, and specifically non-white, social contexts is a necessary step towards coalition

123. Ibid.

124. Ibid.

125. Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous
Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 3.

126. Ibid., ix.

Mo’e’hahne 50
building between Indigenous and non-Indigenous politics and decolonizing the of foundational
regimes of settler colonialism. Horizontal political praxes are not only about finding
commonalities between and across subject positions, but also understanding how the violent
differences between subject position are constituted and lived, specifically the constitutive
outside of the settler subject.
Following Trask, I also reconceptualize how “American” and “Americanness” are
inhabited and practiced in multiracial and multiethnic Los Angeles settler colonialism. Textually
and epistemologically seeking to inscribe the forms of “othering” produced by US regimes of
race, David Palumbo-Liu has developed the practice of signifying the subject positions of
Asian/Americans with a solidus (“/”).
127
For Palumbo-Liu, the solidus marks the always-
conditional relations of Asian/American inclusions, exclusions, and liminality within the US
colonizing bios and polis. However, Palumbo-Liu, like many normative formations of
Asian/American critique and critical ethnic studies, does not frame Asian/American othering and
exclusion through relations of settler-colonial power, rather the emphasis is on race and racial
whiteness.
128
While white supremacy remains a central relation of force in the colonial present,

127. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999).

128. There is a tendency in recent academic discourse to speak of white supremacy and settler colonialism
as synonymous and interchangeable. This overlooks the complex racial dynamics of settler colonialism in the
Americas in general and California specifically which have shifted over time. For example, there is an
overdetermination in many analysis of North American settler colonialism to interpellate settler formations only as
only “white.” For instance, Scott Lauria Morgensen reads colonizing biopolitical and cultural forms as normatively
aligned with or being enacted by whiteness. In contrast, Morgensen, however, reads non-white, queer formations as
seeking solidarity with Indigenous socialities. These theorizations of colonial domination and whiteness are
important and instructive. However, in order to conceptualize the range of settler-colonial formations, analyses of
the settler-colonial past and present must attend to the forms of colonization that have been and are practiced by
non-white socialities and cultures, especially social formations that are enacted in opposition to whiteness. In Spaces
of Violence, I argue that settler colonialism in Los Angeles did not originate as a solely white formation because
multiple racial categories of people participated in colonization. At the very least, Spanish and Mexican colonial
governmentality operated through an expanded definition of whiteness that contrasts with nineteenth, twentieth, and
twenty-first-century US definitions. Morgensen, Spaces Between Us, 2-4, 178-179.
Mo’e’hahne 51
and processes of inclusion into the colonizing body politic and political economy are always
conditional, Spaces of Violence posits that both white and non-white settler subjects are always
already marked as American by their transit through and occupation of the Indigenous
homelands claimed and occupied by the US settler colony. For instance, Jodi Byrd writes that the
occupied Indigenous homelands of North American have been transformed into a “global
commons,” which is then presented as a solution to global inequalities through the promises of
US liberal multiculturalism.
129
The United States colony, therefore, becomes “a geopolitical
space that offers asylum to global and transnational diasporas.”
130
Spaces of Violence thus argues
that settling subjects are marked by traces of Americanness through their participation in the US
settler regimes of migration, which position the occupied Indigenous homelands of North
America as a “global commons.” Settling subjects are also marked by their participation in the
US political economies, which are also premised on the theft and occupation of Indigenous
homelands. However coerced and precarious the subject positions of settler subjects may be,
seeking economic mobility, enfranchisement, and safety through the settler economies of
life/death, that are structured by Indigenous elimination and replacement constitute practices of
American settler colonialism.
131
This conceptualization of Americanness requires moving
beyond reading “American” as a signification of citizenship or full inclusion. Instead, American
and Americanness represent settler-colonial praxes and positionalities.

129. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 204.

130. Ibid., 203.

131. On the other hand, Jodi Byrd borrows the term “arrivants” from the Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite
“to signify those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonial
imperialism around the globe.” Ibid., xix.

Mo’e’hahne 52
The Sociology of Settler-Colonial Society and Social Texts
Understanding Los Angeles settler-colonial entanglements requires reading a range of
everyday social formations. The cultural worlds of Los Angeles, for instance, are articulated
across multiple social forms that include textual, visual, and spatial media. These transmedial
132

forms can be analyzed as what sociologist Henri Lefebvre calls a “social text.”
133
In Critique of
Everyday Life Volume Two: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, Lefebvre proposes the
study the everyday through a theory of “moments.” The everyday, Lefebvre argues, is
constituted through the production and ordering of material, cultural, semantic, and social
“forms” and “content” through space and time. For Lefebvre, the social text “is how we each
perceive the semantic field in everyday life.”
134
According to Lefebvre, “[w]e all find ourselves
constantly...faced with a social text. We leaf through it, we read it…we are all part of a social
text. We are not only readers; we are also read…since the social text encompasses us, we must
see ourselves thus encompassed.”
135
As collection of moments and spaces, Lefebvre argues that
the “everyday” provides insight into how relations of power and its residual effects structure
social and the cultural forms. While Lefebvre was primarily concerned with Marxian
conceptions of political economy in the global north and was writing from within the
Francophone colonial metropole at a time when global French extractive and settler-colonial

132. My use of “transmedia” is inspired by Rey Chow’s thinking through and with the term. However,
following Aileen Moreton Robinson’s theorizations and of settler-colonial societies and the spatialities they create, I
read spaces and spatial forms as media that work to inscribe in colonial cultures and colonial bios into Indigenous
homelands. Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Duke University Press, 2012);
Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive.

133. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Volume Two: Foundations for a Sociology of the
Everyday.1961. Trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), 306.

134. Ibid.,

135. Ibid., 306-307.

Mo’e’hahne 53
violences were ongoing, his methodology importantly views the social as a sedimentation of the
cultural, spatial, and semantic fields. This approach further opens social analysis to trans-
disciplinary modes of inquiry that draw on variety of reading practices. Spaces of Violence takes
a transdisciplinary approach to social and cultural analysis by drawing on methodologies from
sociology, literary studies, cultural studies, cinema studies, history, and philosophy to analyze a
heterogeneous collection of social texts. I argue that the seemingly banal ways that Indigenous
figurations take shape in Los Angeles colonial culture reveal the workings the settler-colonial
power matrix and its past-present residues (for example, as demonstrated in the museum docent’s
narration of “the Indian” as a fated figure that is folded into geological time, or the moving-
image Indian of Tangerine that opened this chapter). Shari Huhndorf writes that Indigenous
people “are among the most commonly represented people in the world, their images are
circulated in museums, photographs, films, ethnographic displays, and national monuments.”
136

Huhndorf calls for increased Indigenous studies analysis of visual culture in both colonial,
global, and Indigenous contexts. Spaces of Violence, therefore, centers visual registers as
important sites for practicing colonial hegemony through Indigenous figuration, in both local and
transnational settler formations. It my hope that these methods of analysis and temporal
revisiting contribute to projects of decolonization through dismantling the ways that the colonial
power matrix operates—through regimes of pedagogical common sense and signification—so
that their material and corporeal analogues can also be dismantled.

136. Shari Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 20.
Mo’e’hahne 54
The Colonizing Bios, Necropower, and the Nomos of the Settler Colony
Michel Foucault and Giogrio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics illuminate how relations
of sovereign power can produce a politics of life and death through articulations of violence.
These formulations are ascendant in transnational and Euroamerican theorizations of racial
hierarchies and the politics of populations. However, Foucault and Agamben’s theories
emphasize the securing of life rather than the active work of death while also eliding colonial
formations and colonial relations of sovereign power. The theories also discursively reproduce
Eurocentric conceptions of both politics and life, while maintaining ahistoricity and temporal and
spatial blind spots (that fail to account for settler-colonial violences, past and present). In this
section, I read the genealogies of Eurocentrist logos that underlie both theorists’ formulations of
biopolitics. I conclude by considering Foucault and Agamben’s conceptualizations of (political)
life and the active work of killing in relation to the colonial condition through Achille Mbembe’s
theory of Necropower.
Traces of the ancient Greek conceptions of life, death, and politics continue to structure
normative theories of biopolitics. For instance, Giorgio Agamben begins Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life by explaining that the Greeks did not have a single term for life, rather they
used two terms: zoē, “which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings
(animals, men, or gods)” and bios, “which indicated the form or way of living proper to an
individual or a group.”
137
In this rendering, the “natural” or animal life of zoē is excluded from
the place of proper living, bios and bios politikos. Zoē is, therefore, confined to the worlds of

137. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9; Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics. 1995.
Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 2.

Mo’e’hahne 55
“reproduction” and the sphere of the home, oikos.
138
In other words, there was no term for a
“politics of human life” or the “politics of living,” in Aristotelian Greek, only a sphere for proper
life and a sphere for natural/reproductive life. Hannah Arendt writes that “the chief characteristic
of [a] specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is
that it...can be told as a story, [and] establish a biography.” In Arendt’s reading of Aristotle, what
distinguished bios from mere zoē was that bios “somehow is a kind of praxis.”
139
Agamben
similarly reads Aristotle, arguing that bios represented the capacity for lifeforms to speak with a
distinctly human voice and culture. To put it another way, it is the stories that are told with and
through these signs—and their transliterations and translations—that give the concepts meaning
through time as they are signified in Euroamerican critical and poststructural theories and thus
inscribed in Euroamerican imaginings of the political order.
René Dietrich argues that even as Foucault and Agamben claim to transcend this model
of “proper life” and “natural life” they still reproduce investments in “Greek democracy.”
140

According to Dietrich, both theorists naturalize a “specist” and anthropocentric model of life
through a theory that excludes non-human life as well as “land” from the terrain of the “living.”
Through these exclusions, Dietrich contends, land, as a source of life (both human and non-
human), is written out of what is considered proper politics. Dietrich argues that such traces of
bios continue to animate normative theorizations of biopolitics, which, in turn, through this

138. Ibid. In Aristotelean terms, what was translated into Latin and then other European languages as
“politics” most closely resembles that of bios politikos (political life), as Aristotle distinguished it from the life of
the philosopher (bios theōrētikos), and life of pleasure (bios apolaustikos).

139. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.1958. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 96-97.

140. René Dietrich, “The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality,” Cultural
Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (2017): 69.

Mo’e’hahne 56
exclusion, fail to conceptualize lived Indigenous praxes and lifeworlds, especially those living
under the duress of settler occupation.
According to Michel Foucault, before the birth of biopolitics, sovereign power was
expressed as the “power of life and death.” For Foucault, this was practiced as the right to “take
life or let live.”
141
However, since the amorphous “the classical age,” Foucault writes that the
“West” has undergone a shift in the mechanisms of sovereign power: “One might say the ancient
right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of
death.”
142
According Foucault, “starting in the seventeenth century, this power over life evolved
in two basic forms.”
143
He delineates this first instantiation of sovereign power as the “anatomo-
politics of the human body,” which was “centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the
optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness
and its docility, [and thus] its integration into the systems of efficient economic controls.”
144

According to Foucault, the second instantiation was formed “somewhat later,” once more in an
amorphous time, which he later locates in the eighteenth century. It is important to note that by
this time the colonization of the Americas had been raging for over two centuries and by the mid
eighteenth century the colonization of California had begun. This second mode, according to
Foucault, was “focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and
serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births, and mortality, level of

141. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978),
136.

142. Ibid., 137.

143. Ibid., 137-138.

144. Ibid.

Mo’e’hahne 57
health, life expectancy and longevity.” The supervision and “regulatory controls” of the species
body came to represent “a biopolitics of the population.”
145
Through a politics of granting life to
the human body as species, techniques of sovereign state power over the body proliferated
through institutions that were aimed at the production of populations, thus “marking the
beginning of an era of ‘biopower.’”
146
Speaking primarily of Europe, Foucault contends, that
during the “modern era,” biopower was exercised through “a taking charge of life more than
death.”
147
It is at this confluence of governmentality, biopower, and the administration of
populations that modern regimes of hierarchal sexuality and gender became the work of the
sovereign. The production of “the body as species,” therefore, rested on praxes of heterosexual
biological and ideological reproduction.
“For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the
additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his
existence as a living being in question.”
148
In Foucault’s theory of bio-power through the
production of human life, the letting live or abandoning to die, rests on biological and, therefore,
heterosexual reproduction. Biopolitics, therefore, represents a rearticulation of zoē
(reproductive/natural life) to forms of bios (proper and valued life), which are akin to bios
politikos (political life) in Aristotelian terms. In other words, with the increased “anatomo-
politics of the human body” through sexuality, the gendered and sexed relations of the home
became part of the sphere of politikos, that which is administered by sovereign power. Through
politics of permitting of certain subjects to live, while allowing others to die, the production of

145. Ibid., 138.

146. Ibid. 140

147. Ibid., 142-143.

148. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 143.
Mo’e’hahne 58
bios (proper forms of living) becomes the prime expression of sovereign power, rather than the
work of killing. But what happens to the space of death in such relations of power? Those
excluded from bios do not become mere zoē, that is, simply allowed to reproduce outside of the
proper place of politics as animal life or pure biological life? This is because Foucault’s
theorization of bios already contains zoē (the work of reproduction). In other words, what is the
“constitutive outside” of bios? And how is death then articulated in the colonies that are both
temporally and spatially located outside of Foucault’s model?
Adapting political theorist Carl Schmitt’s formulation of sovereignty, Giogrio Agamben
argues that sovereign power does not simply rest on the law and normative social practices of a
given political order. Instead, for Schmitt and Agamben, sovereign power lies in the exception.
According to Schmitt, how the sovereign (as a monarch or nation state) responds to the
exception, particularly in times of crisis, is what defines sovereign power.
149
According to
Agamben, “the ban” or the act of excluding a subject through the state of exception, represents
the foundation of late-modern, nation state political orders. Agamben argues that within these

149. Carl Schmitt’s writings on sovereignty and the law in the context of European late-modern and early
twentieth-century nation states have had an enduring impact on theorizations of (political) violence and biopower.
Ironically, the Nazi sympathizer’s work has genealogical traces in critical theories of biopolitics, most notably
Giogrio Agamben, where, paradoxically, the shadows of the Holocaust loom large. For instance, in The Political
Theology, Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Schmitt writes that the “[s]overeign is he who decides on
the exception.” For Schmitt, sovereignty, understood in this way, can only be applied to an “emergency or decree of
siege.” For “[a] jurisprudence concerned with the ordinary day to day questions has...no interest in the concept of
sovereignty,” rather the question of sovereignty arises and is thereby made material when the jurisprudence
encounters what it defines a “disturbance” to the prevailing social order, which sovereign jurisprudence declares an
“exception.” “What [therefore] characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the
suspension of the existing order.” “Whether God alone is sovereign, that is, the one who acts as his acknowledged
representative on earth, or the emperor, or prince, or the people, meaning those who identify themselves directly
with the people, the question is always aimed at subject of sovereignty...[and] Who is supposed to have unlimited
power?” Schmitt argues that it is “precisely the emergency” that makes the question of sovereignty “relevant,”
because it is in “matters[s] of extreme emergency and how it’s to be eliminated” the full force of the
sovereign/decision is exercised. Carl Schmitt, The Political Theology, Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.
1922. Trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5, 6-7, 12, 10.

Mo’e’hahne 59
political orders, bios represents the accepted forms of political life, and, therefore, the subject of
sovereignty’s humanity. Through the “inclusive exclusion” and what Agamben calls the “zone of
indistinction” (between zoē and bios), full subjecthood, however, always already contains traces
of zoē. Agamben theorizes this zoē as “bare, naked life” that has been stripped of its political
rights.
150
Turning to Roman law, Agamben identifies homo sacer as the subject that has been
stripped of its political humanity and can be killed indiscriminately but not sacrificed. According
to Agamben, homo sacer’s life is sacred because it is made to symbolically mirror that of the
sovereign (monarch) through its potential inclusion in the political order as bios/human.
151

Through patriarchal sovereignty and filial piety, Agamben theorizes homo sacer as the figure of
the son who defies the father’s (the sovereign) rule and, in turn, must be abandoned to die for his
transgressions. Agamben argues that through the patriarchal logic of consanguinity, the father
cannot put his son to death without violating the familial bonds of the relationship between the
sovereign patriarch and the bios (the citizen, children). The sacred life of the citizen must,
therefore, be converted to homo sacer in order to be put to death. For Agamben, “[t]he
fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as a originary political
element and as a threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoē.”
152

For Agamben, the camp is the space where the exception becomes the nomos of
sovereignty: “[t]he camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become

150. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7.

151. Ibid, 87.

152. Ibid., 181. Agamben argues that this prohibitive principle has been reproduced throughout Post-
Enlightenment liberal law, which is why he posits the state of exception as the nomos of death. It is only through the
state of exception that citizen subjects can be made to die through abandonment, a casting away from the father.
However, this state of exception is open to all subjects that might transgress the sovereign. Ibid., 88.

Mo’e’hahne 60
the rule.”
153
Whether the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the “campos de con centra
dones that were created in 1896 by the Spaniards in Cuba” or the “concentration camps into
which the English herded the Boers at the beginning of the twentieth century [an instance of
white on white settler-colonial violence in occupied South Africa],” Agamben contends that
“[w]hat happened in the camps exceeds the juridical concept of crime...The camp is the place in
which the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized.”
154
Agamben
argues that the subject of “naked life” is clearly articulated through the state of exception
practiced in the camps. Because there is no law, the camp “constitute[s] a space of exception”
and, therefore, “everything is truly possible in them.”
155
Because of the willful and systematic
production of bare life that takes place in the camp, for Agamben the camp is the “most absolute
biopolitical space that has ever been realized — a space in which power confronts nothing other
than pure biological life without any mediation.”
156
In the camp, bare life is reduced to “pure
biological life.” Through this transmogrification into a form of zoē, sovereign power can engage
in active murder and systematic extermination in a space where the exception becomes the
nomos. “In Hitler’s Germany,” Agamben writes, “an unprecedented absolutization of the
biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power
to make die, such that biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics.”
157
According to

153. Agamben, Means Without End, 50.

154. Here, Agamben explicitly references the “white” intra-settler colonial violences that transpired in the
spaces of the concentration camps that were created by the British settler governmentality in occupied South Africa
at the beginning of the twentieth century. The concentration camps that were created for non-whites and Indigenous
peoples under the same regimes, however, are absent. Importantly, the traces of racialized, non-white death in the
spaces of settler-colonial siege remain invisible to Agamben’s formulations of biopower. Ibid., 49.

155. Ibid. 51.

156. Ibid., 52.

157. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 83.
Mo’e’hahne 61
Agamben, “[t]oday it is not the city but rather the [concentration] camp that is the fundamental
biopolitical paradigm of the West.”
158
For Agamben, in contemporary epoch of “Western” (read
European) politics, “the ‘body’ is always already a biopolitical body and bare life…In its
extreme form, the biopolitical body of the West (this last incarnation of homo sacer) appears as a
threshold of absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life.”
159
In
Agamben’s theorization of metropolitan, European sovereignty, “bios lies in zoē exactly as
essence.”
160

For Agamben, the Jewish Holocaust practiced by Nazi sovereign state power in the
“camp” forever haunts theorizations of biopolitics and the possibilities of killing in relation to
sovereignty. (Foucault’s Lectures at the Collége De France, 1975-76 also illustrate readings of
Nazi state sovereign power and state racism as the ultimate biopolitical formations.
161
) For
Agamben, adapting Schmitt’s formulations, the camp is the nomos of the “modern” as the forms
of life and death practiced in the camp represent the political realities of modern and late-modern
nation states where the lives of the citizens of sovereignty can be converted from bios to bare life
at any time by articulations of sovereign power.
162
For Agamben, the figure of the Muselmänner
becomes the ultimate embodiment of bare life.
163
The Muselmänner was a German transliteration
of Muselmann in Farsi or Musulaman in Turkish, a follower of Islam. (The terms became the

158. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 181.

159. Ibid, 187.

160. Ibid, 188.

161. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collége De France, 1975-76. Eds. and
trans. Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, Francois Ewald, David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 241, 258,
259.
162. Agamben thus argues: “Today it is not the city but rather the [concentration] camp that is the
fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.” Agamben, Homo Sacer, 181.

163. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 41-85.
Mo’e’hahne 62
derogatory term, Muselmann, in German).
164
The Muselmänner were those subjects who were
dying from starvation and exhaustion simultaneously in Auschwitz.
165
All these death-bound
subjects could do was lay prostrate, as if performing the Islamic Salat prayers. This embodiment
of unspeakable anguish, horror, and slow death has become the absolute figure of biopolitical
violence: the subject willfully excluding from life to wait for death. Through the Muselmann,
Agamben writes, “we witness the emergence of something like an absolute biopolitical
substance that cannot be assigned to a particular bearer or subject, or be divided by another
caesura.”
166
In the death spaces of the camp, the Muselmann represents the “final biopolitical
substance.”
167
As a death-bound subject, the Muselmänner also carries a transtemporal,
grotesque trace of Muslim abjection.
168

164. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist
Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 54.

165. These dying subjects, which according to survivors, appeared as the “living dead” or “walking
corpses,” went by many names in the different death camps: “mummy men,” “donkeys,” “cretins,” “cripples,”
“swimmers,” “camels,” “tired sheiks,” or in Ravensbrück, the women’s camp, “Muselweiber” (female Muslims) or
“trinkets.” Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 41-45, 54. Agamben continues: “The Muselmann is not only or not so
much a limit between life and death; rather, he marks the threshold between the human and inhuman.” Agamben,
Remnants of Auschwitz, 55.

166. Ibid., 85.

167. Agamben continues: “It is then possible to understand the decisive function of the camps in the system
of Nazi biopolitics. They are not merely the place of death and extermination; they are also, and above all, the site of
production of the Muselmann, the final biopolitical substance to be isolated in the biological continuum. Beyond the
Muselmann lies only the gas chamber.” Ibid. 85.

168. Alexander G. Weheliye contends that the dominant formulations of bare life, biopolitics, necropolitics,
and social death “neglect and/or actively dispute the existence of alternative modes of life alongside the violence,
subjection, exploitation, and racialization, that define the modern human.” Weheliye, therefore, proposes the concept
of habeas viscus “to signal how violent political domination activates a fleshy surplus that simultaneously sustains
and disfigures said brutality.” To “reclaim the atrocity flesh,” Weheliye argues, is thus “a pivotable arena” for the
politics of the oppressed. The concept of “[t]he flesh,” therefore, “rather than displacing bare life or civil death,
excavates the social (after)life of these categories.” For Weheliye, the flesh is not as overdetermining as bare life and
thus holds counter hegemonic and liberatory potential. In Spaces of Violence, rather than charting how violated and
abjected Indigenous subjects have and continue to resist violent colonial—as opposed to merely “political”—
domination(s), as we indeed do, I propose that, given the paradoxical prevalence of Indigenous (embodied, political,
and narrative) absences in Los Angeles colonial culture alongside settler practices of appropriation and animation;
we must first excavate the colonial past-present work of “atrocity” in its many material, social, and cultural forms.
Mo’e’hahne 63
In “‘Living My Native Life Deadly’: Red Lake, Ward Churchill, and the Discourses of
Competing Genocides,” Jodi Byrd writes that narratives of competing genocides dangerously
seek to create moral equivalencies between violence and pit “all survivors” of genocidal
moments “against each other.”
169
These equivalencies, in turn, “reify the oppressors’ innocence
and control.”
170
Byrd remind us that “U.S. national narratives depend upon the collision of the
competing historical genocides of African Americans, Jews, Palestinians, and Indians to gloss,
obscure, and cancel each other out.”
171
Heading Byrd’s cautions and actively writing against
narratives of competing genocides, I want to consider how the horror of the Muselmänner and
their many “sociological ghosts”
172
render some deaths legible and other deaths illegible in
normative theorizations of biopolitics. How does this illegibility mirror the constitutive outside
of both the European Enlightenment subject, the settler subject, and the colonizing bios? Why is
it that the Muselmänner haunts Agamben’s writings and not the centuries of deaths in the Jewish
pogroms that occurred in the violent orbits of Roman law across European Christendom, the very
nomos from which his theorization of homo sacer originates? Why not the Armenian Holocaust

The regimes of colonial necropower—and its multiple analogues—that continue to delimit Indigenous life and
secure the reproduction of colonial bios must first be exposed in order to begin dismantling such relations of power
in the spaces of occupied Yaanga. Furthermore, like many iterations of poststructuralist theory, Weheliye’s readings
are not free from the traces of settler-colonial spatial and epistemic violence. For example, rearticulating Deleuze
and Gattari’s poststructural spatial imaginary—which is representative of what Alex Trimble Young calls the
“settler colonial imaginary” — Weheliye, argues that the flesh “represents racializing assemblages of subjection that
can never annihilate the lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds”
[emphasis added]. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus,1-2, 3.

169. Jodi Byrd, “‘Living My Native Life Deadly’: Red Lake, Ward Churchill, and the Discourses of
Competing Genocides,” American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring, 2007), 313.

170. Ibid.

171. Ibid.

172. Avery Gordon Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 1997. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi.

Mo’e’hahne 64
exacted by Ottoman sovereign power following the First World War—the events that legal
scholar Raphael Lemkin analyzed in forming his theory of “genocide” before the Holocausts of
the Second World War had transpired?
173
Why are the dozens of Jewish pogroms that occurred
across Europe in between the twentieth-century world wars absent from genealogies of
biopolitics? And why are the liminal subjects of the Atlantic African slave trade and the
dispossessed and targeted Indigenous socialities of the Americas absent? I also want to hold in
suspension the corporeal violences of Yaanga that were visited on Indigenous bodies under
settler colonialism, that I re/visit in the following chapters, and ask: why are these deaths and
delimitations of life unintelligible to biopolitical theory as ultimate modes of bare life? And what
of the subjects of extra/ordinary sovereign violence that are not racialized as white? Part of the
answer lies in how Foucault and Agamben conceptualize late-modern sovereignty as always
articulated by the nation state and formed dialectally through forms of governmentality that are
representative of what Carl Schmitt calls the “European juridical order (Jus publicum
Europaeum).”
174
As such, Foucault and Agamben ignore the than the spaces of violence
produced in a settler colony and by settler-colonial relations of sovereign power and law. Spaces
of Violence thus seeks to analyze contexts of active killing where taking life is not defined in
relation to the European nation state or law, but rather the settler polis and colonizing bios.
Responding to Foucault and Agamben, Achille Mbembe asks, is a theory of biopower
“sufficient” to account for race and racialized terror? Is biopower sufficient when the spaces of
the colony, the slave plantation, and the contemporary proliferation of imperial “war

173. Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide” in Alexander Laban Hinton ed. Genocide: An Anthropological Reader
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).

174. Schmitt, The Political Theology.

Mo’e’hahne 65
machines”
175
globally (“where murder is the primary objective under the guise of “fighting
terror”) are considered?
176
Mbembe argues that readings of twentieth century forms of
totalitarianism and genocide enacted in the Nazi “concentration/extermination camps” position
the biological production of bare life and political temporalities of the state of exception in ways
that overlook the centuries of European colonial domination globally as well as and the internal
ordering of the others in Europe through race (for example, represented by Jewish pogroms and
histories of racialization).
177
Mbembe contends that through the pre and post Enlightenment
periods, the colonial violences that worked to sustain Europe have been simply been naturalized
as political modernity.
178
Mbembe argues that the prevailing theories of the “subject” and
“democracy” informing Foucault and Agamben formulations also assume that the practice of
democracy aspires to modernity through the realization of “reason,” such that reason forms “the
topos of sovereignty.”
179
According to Mbembe, these formulations posit that “the ultimate
expression of sovereignty is the production of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of
free and equal men and women. These men and women are posited as full subjects capable of
self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation.”
180
In contrast, Mbembe sets out
to theorize “those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy
but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence,” in other words, those whose lives

175. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 222-243.

176. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,”12.

177. For an analysis of the racialization of Jewish populations in Europe before the Second World War see
Wolfe Traces of History, 85-112.

178. Ibid.,13.

179. Ibid.

180. Ibid.

Mo’e’hahne 66
are governed by relations of force where “the material destruction of human bodies and
populations” is the nomos.
181
The production of these subjectivities, according to Mbembe, “like
the death camps, are what constitute the nomos of the political space in which we still live.”
182

For Mbembe, “politics represent a form of war,” specifically the ways that they are practiced in
the colony. Politics is “the work of death” where “sovereignty [is] expressed predominantly as
the right to kill” rather than the right to let live and foster life.
183
Mbembe proposes a theory of
Necropower to analyze these conditions of extreme racialized and colonial duress under relations
of sovereign power that are articulated as Necropolitics: the “subjugation of life to the power of
death.”
184

Prevailing theories of biopolitics, Mbembe writes, already account for racial subjection
by assuming the death of the racialized, liminal subject. Foucault’s formulation of biopower,
Mbembe observes, appears to “function through dividing people into those who must live and
those who must die.” Operating on a presumed split in the “biological field,” Foucault
“presupposes the distribution of the human species into groups, the subdivision of the population
into subgroups.”
185
The existence of distinct races is already naturalized in the calculus of bios.
In this way, the racialized subject exists liminally between zoē and bios but is already assumed to
be excluded from bios and, therefore, destined for death.

181. Ibid.

182. Ibid., 14.

183. Ibid., 13, 16.

184. Ibid., 40.

185. Ibid., 17.

Mo’e’hahne 67
Mbembe reads the spaces of the slave plantation in relation to the Agamben’s
formulation of the camp as the space where as “the state of exceptions becomes the nomos.”
Mbembe argues that, “the very structure of the plantation system and its aftermath
manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.” Mbembe writes that,
for instance, “the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow.” He writes,
“the slave condition results from a triple loss: loss of a ‘home,’ loss of rights over his or her
body, and loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal
alienation, and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether).”
186
Furthermore, Mbembe
writes, because the slave’s life has a price and a value, but the slave cannot exercise control over
their body (or life), terror becomes the corporeal language of violence that orders the slave’s
being. The “slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantom like world of
horrors and intense cruelty and profanity...Slave life, in many ways, is a form of death-in-life.”
187

The slave plantation represents the absolute state of exception as the liminal subjects
incarcerated in its boundaries resemble the living dead and thus constitute complete “bare life”:
biological life stripped of its humanity and potential as bios. The slave and the slave planation
are subjects and spaces neglected in normative biopolitical theory because they are always
already outside of what constitutes proper life and the place of proper politics within European
relations of sovereign (state) power. As spaces where the human is converted into property and
subjects into objects, the patriarchal and filial relations of the sovereign and the citizen theorized
by Agamben have no bearing in the colonial slave plantation.

186. Ibid., 21.

187. Ibid.

Mo’e’hahne 68
Mbembe writes that the colony is another “formation of terror” where normative theories
of biopolitics and sovereign power fail to capture its nomos of violence. The colony always
already exists outside of the “European juridical order (Jus publicum Europaeum),” as do the
colony’s attendant political imaginaries and nomos of killing. Within the European juridical
order, there is equity between sovereign monarchs and nation states. “Just wars,” Mbembe
writes, can only be waged against a sovereign’s standing army, and the sovereign has complete
dominion over its subjects. However, in the colonies, there are no recognizable sovereigns,
armies, or citizens. Colonies “are inhabited by ‘savages,’” that are not part of the “human
world.” There is no “distinction between combatants and noncombatants, or... between an
“enemy” and a “criminal.”
188
It is impossible to conclude peace with savages. The colony is thus
“par excellence where the controls and guarantees of [the] judicial order can be suspended.” In
fact, it is in the colony “where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the
service of ‘civilization.’” In other words, the colony is where the savages must be destroyed in
order to establish law.
189
According to Mbembe, in the colony, peace is more likely to take the
form of a war without end. The necropolitics of colonialism are also inherently spatial. For
instance, Mbembe writes, colonial occupation is:
[a] matter of seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physical geographical
area—of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations...the production of
boundaries and hierarchies...the classification of people according to different categories;
resource extraction; and, finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural
imaginaries” to support colonial domination.
190

188. Ibid., 41.

189. Ibid., 24.

190. Ibid., 25-26.

Mo’e’hahne 69
In the colony, “space,” rather than the monarch, nation state, or citizenry (demos) forms the “raw
material of sovereignty and the violence it carries with it.”
191
For the Indigenous, this spatialized
sovereignty means “relegating the colonized into a third zone between subjecthood and
objecthood.”
192
For Mbembe, the nomos of sovereign force in the colony is characterized by the
active putting to death as opposed to simply abandoning to die: “the ultimate expression
of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live
and who must die. . .To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define
life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”
193
Therefore, a theory of necropower rather
than biopower accounts for the relations of force and articulations of death found in the colony.
Necropolitics thus encompasses “the various ways in which, in our contemporary world,
weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons,” the active “creation of
death-worlds,” and the “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are
subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”
194

Mbembe also reads the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine throughout the twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries in order to illustrate how necropower is operationalized spatially
and racially in the contemporary epoch. “Late-modern colonial occupation differs in many ways
from early-modern occupation,” he writes, “particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the
biopolitical, and the necropolitical.” For Mbembe, “[t]he most accomplished form of necropower
is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine.”
195
Mbembe illuminates the necropolis that

191. Ibid., 27.

192. Ibid.

193 Ibid., 8.

194. Ibid., 40.

195. Ibid., 27.
Mo’e’hahne 70
is the contemporary settler-colonial occupation of Palestine and the nomos of slaughter, siege,
and dispossession that characterize it. Mbembe’s analyses, however, naturalizes the historic and
ongoing Anglophone settler-colonial occupations of the Americas, the Pacific, and Oceania by
failing to similarly cast them as intensified, colonial sieges that exhibit routinized and accelerated
machinations of necropower through the destruction of Indigenous populations, slaving, and the
consuming of Indigenous lifeworlds as the raw material of the colonizing sovereignty and bios
(in both the modern and late-modern epoch). For example, the settler sovereign and private
military violences enacted against Indigenous people that were captured by the news media at
Standing Rock throughout 2016 and 2017 (in addition to the conditions of colonial siege and
dispossession that Indigenous peoples living in occupied North America continue to endure) can
be read as representative of the same technologies of necropower operationalized in occupied
Palestine. It is, nevertheless, instructive that Mbembe turns to formations of settler colonialism,
occupation, and Indigenous dispossession in order to illustrate the ultimate colonial and racial
iterations of necropower. Even though Mbembe does not identify the death worlds and sieged
Indigenous lives of occupied Palestine as enduring distinctly settler-colonial modes domination,
by attaching his theory to such constellations of violence, he demonstrates the analytical ability
of necropolitical theory to describe colonial situations where the liminal Indigenous subject is
not permitted access to life, land, space, or place. The nomos of death dealing, carcerality, and
exclusion from space and life that engulf the setter-colonized spaces and Indigenous peoples of
Palestine so too engulf the Indigenous lifeworlds of North American (whose proper place,
according to settler colonial jurisprudence and nomos is either the carceral grid of the reservation
or bio/necropolitical liquidation and amalgamation). US settler necropolitical technologies, in
fact, can be read as operating dialectically with the settler necropolitical technologies exacted on
Mo’e’hahne 71
occupied Palestine (like the multitudes of peoples and spaces targeted globally by US war
machines, which I consider in the coda.)
196

In the Los Angeles settler colony, I argue that necropower is the nomos. I do not
conceptualize sovereignty as the will to power or those relations of force created by the law.
Instead, following Mbembe, sovereignty names a relation of power over death that is secured by
colonial attempts to secure spatial occupation and domination. Spaces of Violence argues that
biopolitics and necropolitics can function simultaneously in the settler colony. Some subjects are
permitted to access life as bios, while others, primarily the Indigenous —who are always already
abjected from the settler subjecthood and the settler polis—are actively targeted for destruction
through the coterminous regimes of elimination and slaving. Bringing together analyses of
slavery and settler colonialism, I propose that the mission slave plantation colony and the settler
colony are the primary vectors of settler sovereign necropower in the Yaanga region. In the
chapters that follow, I show that as colonial forms, the mission slave plantation and the settler
colony, combined forms of Indigenous slavery, logics of elimination, and settler-colonial
occupation, which is also dependent on the heterosexual reproduction of new colonizing bios.
Following Andres Resendez’s The Other Slavery: The Untold Story of Indian
Enslavement in America, I seek to put analyses of settler colonial necropower and the myriads of
Indigenous abjection that it produces into closer conversation with the theorizing of the African
Diaspora. By reassessing what can be thought of as “the colonial logic of slavery,” the dialectics
of anti-Blackness, and the transtemporal violence they continue to unleash, I ask: what happens
when the logic of Indigenous elimination also includes slavery? What happens when the
colonizers regard the Indigenous body as an object to be collected, worked, and traded into

196. Additionally, what Mbembe importantly infers is that, for the Global North, occupied Palestine has
become a testing ground for carceral, colonial formations and militarized technologies of death.
Mo’e’hahne 72
obliteration through a formation of “the body as machine” that Foucault argued was the
pre/condition of sovereign power before the emergence of biopolitics and the “species body?”
197

How does is this valueless/ness manifest in the contemporary colonizing cultures of Los Angeles
specifically and North America more broadly?

The Spaces of Violence in Occupied Yaanga:
Visual and spatial significations of Indigenous people abound in Los Angeles. The
numerous instances such as street and places names that are poorly transliterated signs from the
Gabrielino-Tongva and Fernandeño Tatavium languages, for example, Cahuenga, Pacoima,
Topanga, and Tujunga.
198
The settler-colonial cartographies also draw on imagined
transliterations of Natives languages from across North America. For example, the city of
Pasadena claims that its namesake “literally means ‘valley’ in the Ojibwa (Chippewa) Indian
language.”
199
Apache figures also populate the representational and embodied worlds of Los
Angeles public, colonial education through the Apaches of Compton’s Centennial High School
and the Apaches of Arcadia High School. (Both schools were founded in the nineteen fifties and
now educate majority non-white student bodies.) Perhaps the most lethal “Apache” in the history
of US necropolitics, the Apache attack helicopter, also bears the trace of Los Angeles. During the

197. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138.

198. According to Claudia Jurmain and William McCawley, the Gabrielino-Tongva and Fernandeño
Tatavium languages are related forms of a language spoken by Indigenous communities throughout the Yaanga
region. Jurmain and McCawley, O’ My Ancestor.

199. City of Pasadena, California, “Pasadena Facts,” accessed April 7, 2017,
http://www.cityofpasadena.net/Pasadena_Facts_and_Statistics/. However, according to the Ojibwe People’s
Dictionary basadinaa is valley. See Ojibwe People's Dictionary project, University of Minnesota’s Department of
American Indian Studies and University Libraries, accessed April 7, 2017, http://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/main-
entry/basadinaa-vii.

Mo’e’hahne 73
nineteen seventies, the weapon was designed and tested in Arizona by Hughes Helicopters,
which was then headquartered in Culver City, California (which is surrounded by Los Angeles).
There are also numerous Indigenous figurations in Los Angeles settler commerce. For example,
a Pasadena yoga studio that bills itself as an “Urban Sweat Lodge;” while appropriating one
“Indian” culture it imagines itself as another. Through advertisements that feature photographs of
white children among erect Teepees, the Pasadena Kidspace Children’s Museum invites youth to
have an “Arroyo Adventure” and play Indian in spaces proximate to the “Gabrielino [hiking]
Trail.” There are also numerous botánicas and hierberías (herbal-folk medicine shops) that, like
Botánica El Indio on Sunset Blvd. in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, feature
murals replete with Indian/Indio caricatures. However, perhaps the most perplexing Indigenous
presence in advertising media is a 2014-2015 ad campaign by the Angels baseball team (who are
located in Anaheim, California). The campaign in downtown Los Angeles featured signage that
read, “You are on Indian Land,” with the “A” in “Land” replaced with the Angels’ baseball team
logo. The franchise seemingly sought to inform settler publics that the Los Angeles colony
occupied Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva homelands, as if the colonial population and political
economies of Anaheim, California were not constitutive of the same regimes. Or perhaps
through the inherent slippages that accompany the sign “Indian,” the Angels franchise was
claiming to be indigenous to Los “Angeles?” These signification practices are exemplars of
settler-colonial appropriative strategies where Indigenous signs, imagined and otherwise, are
made to signify the colonial bios, polis, and economies rather than Indigenous lifeworlds. As
forms that pedagogically communicate settler-colonial ideologies of domination and Indigenous
abjection in everyday American culture, they are representative of what I call settler Americana.
Mo’e’hahne 74
Rather than reading the texts of Indian imaging that Los Angeles is most known for, the
filmic worlds of Hollywood, or offering a survey of the many Indigenous figurations that
populate Los Angeles settler Americana, Spaces of Violence examines how Indigenous figures
appear in the everyday social fabric of spaces that serve significant pedagogical roles in the local
colonial culture. The archive I read is comprised of a constellation of heterogeneous social and
cultural texts that I encountered while following Indigenous figures in the two mythic spaces of
Los Angeles colonialism: Yaanga and the San Gabriel Valley. In Indians in Unexpected Places,
Philip Deloria demonstrates how cultural expectations about the possibilities for Indigenous life
are disciplined by common-sense knowledges that place Indigenous peoples outside of
modernity. Deloria proposes that by analyzing forms which on the surface appear as “anomalies”
(such as a photograph of a Native woman wearing full regalia in a beauty salon or a popular hip
hop song with traces of anti-Indigenous violence) can reveal histories of Indigenous life that
often go unacknowledged as well as deep cultural patterns of Indigenous abjection that are
naturalized in Euroamerican colonial culture.
200
Spaces of Violence, therefore, analyzes instances
of Indigenous figuration that may on the surface appear anomalous in the webs of Los Angeles
colonial culture.
Chapter one centers formulations of necropower in order to analyze the colonization of
Yaanga under Spanish, Mexican, and United States occupation over the last three centuries. I
examine the spaces of the village of Yaanga that have been subsequently reworlded into the site
of the initial colony in the eighteenth century, grew into Los Angeles in the nineteenth century,
and were transformed into the arcade spaces of Olvera Street and commemorative, leisure spaces
of El Pueblo State Historic Park in the twentieth century. I foreground the Indigenous body as a

200. Philip Deloria, Indian in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 2-6.
Mo’e’hahne 75
transtemporal subject of violence and an integral component of the necro-economies that have
dominated occupied Yaanga over the past two centuries. Following Achille Mbembe, I ask what
place is given to Indigenous life, death, and the Indigenous body, “in particular the wounded or
slain body,” in the spaces of Yaanga and within the dialectics of Los Angeles colonial culture? I
also ask, how is the Indigenous body “inscribed in the [colonial] order of power”? In relation to
settler spatial praxes and political imaginaries, I ask how is the figure of the Indigenous treated in
public, pedagogical narrations of the colonization of Los Angeles and its racial composition?
Reading documents form the Spanish colonial archive, I draw on historical methods to excavate
the colonization of Yaanga in the late eighteenth century in order to offer a clearer picture of the
events than what is normatively presented in settler-state and critical race geography narrations.
Emanating from New Spain and under the direction of the Spanish crown, I posit that the racial
composition of the colonialisms that engulfed Los Angeles differ from the formations of
northern European colonizing bios that engulfed other regions of North America (for instance, in
the Anglophone and Francophone settler colonies). I conclude by analyzing the construction of
La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a Mexican/American museum and cultural center, in the early
twentieth century, to consider Mexican/American settler imaginaries and spatial politics in
relation to contemporary Indigenous life/death in the settler-colonial city.
Chapter two analyzes the filmic spaces and moving-image Indians of the independent
film The Exiles (1962). Written and directed by Kent Mackenzie, a relatively unknown white
male filmmaker and set in downtown Los Angeles, The Exiles follows of a day in the life of a
group Indigenous migrants. As one of the few films that represents so-called urban Indian life
during the mid-twentieth century, since its release The Exiles has been misread as either a
documentary or an accurate representation of urban Indigenous life. I analyze Mackenzie’s
Mo’e’hahne 76
filmic practice by reading his critically neglected masters’ thesis. I ask, how do distinctly settler-
colonial affects and settler sexualities animate Mackenzie’s Indigenous figurations? How do
Mackenzie’s production methods resemble well-worn Euroamerican cultural practices of playing
Indian and going native? How does the film represent the possibilities for Indigenous life in
relation to hegemonic settler conceptions of spatiality, gender, and sexuality?
Chapter three analyzes the Indigenous figurations present at “Uncle Yu Indian Theme
Restaurant,” a Taiwanese/American late-night pub located in San Gabriel, California. Uncle Yu
Indian, as the name suggests, features an American Indian theme that is crafted through an
Indian themed décor as well as an Indian playing female wait staff. Foregrounding the necro-
economies that undergird both the Hispanophone and Anglophone settler colonialisms that I
explore in chapter one, I ask: how do the restaurant’s Indigenous figurations inherit and
reproduce longstanding practices of Indigenous abjection and corporeal violence in both the Los
Angeles region and occupied North America, particularly those regarding Indigenous women?
Given the restaurant’s location within the transnational Asian/American population and political
economies that engulf the San Gabriel Valley, I also ask: how do the “Indians” at Uncle Yu serve
as representational analogues for Los Angeles’s settler necropolitics while also existing as forms
of settler Americana?
Chapter four considers the relations of settler-colonial necropower, reproduction, and
suburban settler possessive logics as they cohere around the figure of the child by examining the
events surrounding the naming and opening of Gabrielino High School in 1994. Located in the
majority non-white suburban spaces of San Gabriel, California, the high school was named after
the Gabrielino-Tongva people. I begin by considering the mid to late-twentieth-century
Asian/American and Latinx urban to suburban migration as well as transnational settler
Mo’e’hahne 77
migrations to the San Gabriel Valley in relation to US necropolitics. I ask, how are these colonial
formations oriented by settler whiteness, the logics of settler possession, and the political
economies of Indigenous elimination and replacement that are cathected to the consumer object
of the suburban single-family home? I also ask, how does US migration policy represent a
history of settler sexuality? I then read archival documents from the San Gabriel Unified School
district to uncover how the figure of the Gabrielino emerged in the naming process. Within the
suburban high school, the ultimate embodied and institutional configuration of settler
Americana, ask what symbolic and necropolitical transformations take place at the high school
through the sign “Gabrielino,” specifically in relation to the colonial violences that haunt the
spaces of the San Gabriel Valley.
I conclude with a coda that explores how Indigenous figurations and the traces of Yaanga
follow the expanding horizons of death that US settler-imperial necropower and its war machines
articulate globally, particularly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For as Jodi
Byrd writes, “[b]ringing indigeneity and Indians front and center to discussions of U.S. empire as
it has traversed across Atlantic and Pacific worlds is a necessary intervention at this historical
moment, precisely because it is through the elision, erasures, enjambments, and repetitions of
Indianness that one might see the stakes in decolonial, restorative justice tied to land, life, and
grievability.”
201

201. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xiii.
Mo’e’hahne 78
Chapter One:
Colonizing Yaanga: Necropolitics, Raciality, and the Indigenous Body
Where stands the “Angel City” now, in stately pride of brick and stone, then stood the Indian
village “Yang-na,” in all its primitive simplicity of reeds and twigs. Here dwelt the aborigines by
the cairns of their ancestors. Here, oblivious of civilization with its injustices and cruelties, its
doubts and perplexities, and happy in their ignorance, they reigned—first occupants, sole
possessors, and—as they believed, paramount lords of the soil.

-Thomas H. Thompson and Albert A. West, History of Los Angeles County, 1880
1

In April 1986, nearly two hundred years after the Spanish colony that would become Los
Angeles was created and one hundred years since the public history of the colony above was
published, the Los Angeles Native American Indian Commission convened a public hearing on
the discrimination and disenfranchisement that Native people in the Los Angeles region face(d).
Indigenous community members were invited to speak at the two-day gathering held in Bell
Gardens, California, a multiracial suburb southeast of downtown Los Angeles with a high
concentration of Native residents.
2
Themes of Indigenous visibility and its spatial analogues soon

1. Thomas H. Thompson and Albert A. West, History of Los Angeles County, California with Illustrations
Descriptive of its Scenery, Residences, Fine Blocks and Manufactories.1880. (Berkeley: Howell-North, 1959).

2. The hearing was held to record the ongoing structural disenfranchisement and quotidian forms of
discrimination that Indigenous people in the region experience and draft policy recommendations. See Los Angeles
County Commission on Human Relations and Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission,
“Utmost Good Faith?”1986; Lynn Simross, “The Plight of Native Americans on the ‘Urban Reservation,’ Los
Angeles Indians Express Concern Over Growing Discrimination at Bell Gardens Hearing,” Los Angeles Times,
April 16, 1986. The Los Angeles Native American Indian Commission is a semi-autonomous body situated within
the local bureaucracies. Through the efforts of Indigenous activists, it was created in 1976 to address the growing
Native population’s political and economic marginality. The massive Indigenous population living in county, which,
according to the US Census, numbered roughly 24,000 in 1970 and 48,000 in 1980, was not served by local organs
of the settler state or the federal bureaucracies that primarily serve Indigenous people living in “reservation” spaces.
According to community members, the Native population was estimated to be 60,000-80,000 at the time of the
hearing in 1986. Community members and scholars provide higher estimates than the government due to the many
ways that Indigenous people are undercounted by the census. The commission serves a symbolic role within the
local governing institutions by holding meetings, attending local politicians’ events, and hosting annual celebrations.
The commission does, however, allocate limited funds through federal block grants. With these resources, it
supports the unrecognized Gabrielino-Tongva and Fernandeño Tataviam tribal non-profit organizations and local
Native non-profit’s providing social and community services. See Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, “Contesting American
Indian Identifications: Blood Logics and Settler Colonialism in Los Angeles Native Community Politics.”
Mo’e’hahne 79
emerged in the testimonies. “We kind of blend in with the rest of the people,” testified Phyllis
Rose, a Gabrielino-Tongva tribal member who worked at a local Native newspaper. “We don’t
have an Olvera Street, or a Little Tokyo. We don’t even have an Indian Center. We need one
especially in Los Angeles. After all, it was our land to begin with [emphasis added].”
3
According
to Rose, the Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva and the Native migrants are biopolitically invisible in
the racially diverse colonial metropolis. Native people are ostensibly read as one of the many
non-white subjects that have come to occupy and repopulate Los Angeles.
4
This invisibility,
Rose observed, is reflected in the ways that, in comparison to non-white settlers and migrants,
Indigenous people are excluded from commemorative public structures in the region, which in
fact occupy spaces that are Indigenous “land to begin with.”
5
The past-tense was in Rose’s
rendering of Gabrielino-Tongva lands importantly bear the trace of the historic and ongoing
colonial violences that have attempted to materially and culturally reworld the Indigenous
homelands of Los Angeles. Gabrielino-Tongva homelands are occupied by the present-day
boundaries of Los Angeles and Orange counties. A constellation of an estimated fifty Gabrielino-

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Bell Gardens has been home to one of the largest
concentrations of Indigenous people in Los Angeles County, many of whom are of migrant origin or the descendants
of migrants and moved to region following the Second World War. For Bell Gardens’ population figures see
Weibel-Orlando, Indian Country, L.A., 24.

3. Simross, “The Plight of Native Americans on the ‘Urban Reservation.’”

4. For analysis of the undercounting of Native people and the census see Jonathan Ong and Paul Ong “Los
Angeles American Indian and Alaska Native Project Technical Memo 5: AIAN Underrepresentation in the ACS,”
University of California, Los Angeles American Indian Studies Center, 19 November 2012, accessed 6 January
2017, http://www.aisc.ucla.edu/research/reports.aspx. For population estimates see Weibel-Orlando, Indian Country,
L.A: Maintaining Ethnic Community in Complex Society.1991 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 24-29.

5. In addition to being denied commemorative public spaces, the Indigenous people of Los Angeles live
without spatial institutions capable of serving the vast Native community, for instance, a regional “Indian center,”
which can be found in many settler-colonial metropolises home to Native migrants throughout North America, such
as Chicago, Illinois or Wichita, Kansas. For example, see, James B. LaGrand, Indian Metropolis: Native Americans
in Chicago, 1945-75 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
Mo’e’hahne 80
Tongva villages are located throughout this geography. Located along what is now currently
identified as the Los Angeles river, Yaanga is one of these villages. Yaanga is currently occupied
by downtown Los Angeles, where Olvera Street and Little Tokyo are located.
6

While non-white settlers and migrants face continued challenges to complete colonial
enfranchisement within the US settler hegemony broadly and the colonial city specifically, they
have, nevertheless, carved out sanctioned and recognizable commemorative spaces on
Gabrielino-Tongva homelands. The arcade Mexican/American spaces of Olvera Street and the
Japanese/American spaces of Little Tokyo do not signify Gabrielino-Tongva pasts, presents, or
futures. Rather, as living panoramas of ethnically themed colonial consumption and commerce,
the spaces represent and affirm the continued presence of non-indigenous socialites. These racial
and ethnic inscriptions work to support settler-colonial biopolitical economies of migration and
spatial economies of occupation.
7
Structures of Indigenous displacement, replacement, and
abjection are not exceptional in the settler-colonial worlds of Los Angeles. Inaugurated by
Spanish colonialism in the eighteenth century, these formations have persisted for over two
centuries and represent the foundational organizing principles of the Los Angeles settler-colonial
order.
In this chapter, I posit that the colonial place-making practices that Rose identified in
1986 remain the mechanisms by which non-Indigenous forms of belonging and structures of
settler colonialism are reproduced in Los Angeles. These spatial practices follow the paths of
settlement and Indigenous abjection established by previous colonizing forms. The paths of

6. Jurmain and McCawley. O, My Ancestor, 7-12.

7. Similarities can be seen between the Paris, France arcades of the mid to late nineteenth century that
Walter Benjamin analyzes and the spaces of ethnic-themed commemoration in Los Angeles because each collection
of spatial and consumptive forms serve to instruct colonial publics in the iconographies of empire making and
narrations of colonial history See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. 1982. trans. Howard Eiland and Keven
McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Mo’e’hahne 81
settlement have, in turn, been sustained by the contemporary colonial order and its concomitant
political economies. I argue that the arcade and commemorative ethnic spaces of downtown Los
Angeles are exemplars of settler colonial entrenchment: socio-spatial formations that seek to
pro/claim a continued non-indigenous presence on and possession of the land despite deep and
enduring Indigenous relations to it. To accomplish this, I analyze the continual reworlding of
Yaanga. I read the spaces drawn into the creation of the initial Spanish colony. Today, these
spaces are commemorated as El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park, which contains
Olvera Street. I consider the re/production of these forms while also reading how they have been
narrated within colonial public, settler state, and academic webs of signification. I also follow the
ways that the figure of the Indigenous appears and is configured within these colonial, spatial
forms and political praxes. I move between the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first
centuries in order to establish a colonial continuity between the formations that have continually
worked to colonize Yaanga. This method of cultural analysis allows the transtemporal traces of
violence that are present in each colonial form to emerge. I read an archive of historical
documents, public narrations, and historiographies that are connected the colonial spatial praxes
that have sought to occupy Yaanga.
I begin by considering how the founding of the Los Angeles colony has been racially
interpellated and narrated in twenty-first-century public culture. Foregrounding Indigenous
presences and the Indigenous body, I read the original violences and spatial practices that were
enacted to create and sustained the colony throughout the eightieth and nineteenth centuries. To
augment the ways that the colonization of Yaanga has been narrated in Los Angeles
historiography, I revisit the eighteenth-century Spanish colonial documents that ordered and
Mo’e’hahne 82
recorded the colonization process.
8
I follow the continuities of violence between Spanish,
Mexican, and US occupation. In order to establish how the settler state continues to apprehend
Indigenous socialites and homelands, I then read mid-twentieth-century plans to redevelop El
Pueblo Park. I conclude by analyzing the development of a Mexican/American cultural center in
the early twenty-first-century: La Plaza de Cultura y Artes. Through a form of analytical
unfolding, this chapter sets in motion the method of cultural critique that is woven throughout
Spaces of Violence. This method seeks to denaturalize cultural constructions of Indigenous
people that are found in public spaces and public social texts by reading them in relation to the
deep temporal and spatial formations of settler colonialism that continue to structure and
reproduce contemporary configurations of colonial necropower. I argue that these formations of
violence bleed through the social fabric as traces that recall previous forms of anti-Indigenous
violence while simultaneously enacting new ones.

Narrating Los Angeles Settler Colonialism and Raciality
The narratives of the colonization of California that are found in Los Angeles public
culture play a role in maintaining colonial hegemonies by circulating common-sense conceptions
of history, race, and space. Tropes of racial diversity and modes of colonial transit figure
prominently in public and scholarly narrations. These stories are fixed to the sites of El Pueblo
de Los Angeles and Mission San Gabriel, furthering transforming them into symbols of the
multiracial settler metropolis. El Pueblo Park, for instance, has been designed a historical

8. These documents include Spanish royal decrees and proclamations by colonial administrators in New
Spain and Alta California. These documents have been translated into English and published as Doyce B. Nunis ed.
The Founding Documents of Los Angeles: A Bilingual Edition (Los Angeles: Zamorano Club of Los Angeles and
Historical Society of Southern California, 2004); The original documents are held at the Bancroft Library at the
University of California, Berkeley.

Mo’e’hahne 83
monument, while also having been constituted as a department within the Los Angeles municipal
government. For example, the City of Los Angeles and El Pueblo Board of Commissioners
offers this account of the colony’s origins:
El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument is near the site of the early pueblo or
town where forty-four settlers of Native American, African, and European heritage
journeyed more than one-thousand miles across the desert from present-day northern
Mexico and established Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula
on September 4, 1781. Since its founding, the city of Los Angeles has become one of the
world’s largest metropolitan areas. Today, as a department of the City of Los Angeles, El
Pueblo is a living museum that continues to fulfill its unique role as the historic and
symbolic heart of the city, celebrating the Native American, African American, Spanish,
Anglo, Mexican, Chinese, Italian and French cultures that contributed to its early history
[emphasis added].

This narration was featured in the city’s 2013 strategic plan for redeveloping the park through
emphasizing the contributions of different racial and ethnic groups. Here, the settler state places
“Native Americans” first in the signification chain of “African American, Spanish, Anglo,
Mexican, and Chinese” settlers that colonized Yaanga, a signification chain that, I will show, has
circulated throughout twentieth and twenty-first-century stories of Los Angeles’s mythic genesis.
What Jodi Byrd calls a “transposable,”
9
and I would add mobile, Indigeneity is written onto the
settlers who originated from occupied New Spain/Mexico. Through the sign “Native American,”
the settling subjects—which potentially included Indigenous peoples from New Spain as well as
“mestizos” of African, Iberian, and Indigenous heritage—are figured as already “indigenous”
and, therefore, native to Los Angeles. Their role in colonizing Gabrielino-Tongva life and lands
is erased, for how can Indigenous peoples colonize their own lands. As the “symbolic heart” of
the settler metropolis, El Pueblo Park is also transformed into the colonial city’s central
biopolitical organ. El Pueblo becomes a pedagogical structure that disciplines colonial common

9. Jodi Byrd, “Follow the Typical Signs: Settler Sovereignty and its Discontents,” Settler Colonial Studies
(17 December 2013), 14 March 2014 accessed http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846388, 3.
Mo’e’hahne 84
sense by narrating multiracial and multiethnic cultural contributions in ways that support the
settler order. In this way, the park becomes a symbol of the contemporary multiracial settler-
colonial metropolis. By foregrounding multiracial colonizing bodies and histories, the social
organ is raced as non-white and, therefore, works to further entrench non-native socialities on
occupied Gabrielino-Tongva lands.
In this narration, the settler state also emphasizes the colonists’ modes of transit,
traversing over a thousand miles of desert to create Los Angeles. The journey’s hardship thus
justifies settler colonization. Lorenzo Veracini, for instance, highlights the narratives differences
between the representations of extractive colonization and settler colonization. “Colonial
narratives normally have a circular form,” Veracini writes, “they represent an Odyssey consisting
of an outward movement followed by interaction with exotic and colonized Others… [and then]
a final return to an original locale.” Settler-colonial narratives, on the other hand, “resembl[e]
[the] Aeneid, where the settler colonizer moves forward along a story line that cannot be turned
back.” Settler narratives, and the colonial structures they discursively support, are dominated by
“teleological” tales of travel, of “penetrating the wilderness,” and enduring hardship in order
arrive at a destination that was inevitable. Rather than returning home with the resources they
have extracted from distant lands—and sometimes the bodies of the subjected others—settler
colonists stay in order to subsume and replace the Indigenous and “transform the [seized] land
into their image.”
10

The city’s pedagogical story of settlement is transmedialy signified across El Pueblo
Park’s digital media. The circulation is exemplified by the curriculum that has been created for
students who visit the park. My City, My History, El Pueblo’s free public children’s book,

10. Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 96-101.
Mo’e’hahne 85
furthers possessive settler logics while also inscribing racial diversity onto notions of colonial
futurity.
11
For example, the cover features multiracial students learning about and imagining the
Los Angeles of the past, present, and future. Los Angeles’s spatial iconography is made to depict
the forward moving telos of settler-colonial temporality. Mexican colonial architecture signifies
the past, city hall, which sits atop of Yaanga signifies the present, and Griffith observatory (the
[historic] site of colonial scientific observation and contemporary tourism), signifies the future,
which is also embodied by a spacecraft and possible off-world colonial futures; while the
multiracial children straddle each temporality.
Figure 1. Front cover, My City, My History (2008)

11. Mariann Gatto, My City, My History: Guide to Discovering Your History and the History of El Pueblo
de Los Angeles, (Los Angeles: City of Los Angeles, El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument and Monument
Commission, 2008), accessed 17 January 2017,
http://elpueblo.lacity.org/HistoryEducation/ForEducators/TeachersandCurriculumGuide/index.html.
Mo’e’hahne 86
The text then instructs students to investigate their ethnic and familial history. Through
this pedagogical exercise, they are asked to connect their own “hopes,” “dreams,” and “visions”
for their future and the future of Los Angles to the figure of Antonio Villaraigosa—the first
Latinx mayor elected under US occupation, who served from 2005-2013. Students are told that
Villaraigosa’s personal Los Angeles story of struggle and success “demonstrates the importance
of dreaming.” The dreaming narrative thus constructs a future that is only made possible through
the past forms of multiracial colonization, which are embodied by the political ascendancy of a
non-white, male colonial administrator, Villaraigosa. Two pages later, Villaraigosa’s smiling
face is followed by an image of a covered wagon that accompanies a “Los Angeles history” cross
word puzzle.
12
Figured closely to the ascendant Latinx subject, the wagon is a visual trace of the
settler spatial practices and ideologies that bleed into contemporary common-sense Los Angeles
formulations of place, race, and temporality. My City, My History also connects settler futurity to
the figure of the child, who, in turn, embodies the regimes of colonial biopolitical reproduction
that work to replace the Gabrielino-Tongva in their homelands. (I explore such emblematic
representations of the figure of the Indigenous and the child further in chapter four.)
In A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng
offer a similar settler-colonization narrative. A People’s Guide is a critical geography and public
history of Los Angeles that is comprised of sites of racial, gendered, and class conflict. For
instance, the authors foreground Mission San Gabriel as the genesis of the multiracial metropolis
while also narrating a racially diverse settler colonialism:
The Greater Eastside and San Gabriel Valley was the first part of Los Angeles settled by
nonnatives [sic]…When the ‘Spaniards’ (who were really a diverse group of indigenous
Mexicans, Afro-Mexicans, and Europeans), began exploring the region, the first place

12. Ibid., 19-26.

Mo’e’hahne 87
they settled was the San Gabriel Mission (1771). There, they introduced many of the
agricultural products for which California is now famous, such as wine, before they
began their forays into what is now downtown Los Angeles [emphasis added].
13

While Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng acknowledge the spaces of violence created through the
colonization of the San Gabriel Valley and Yaanga elsewhere in the text, such sites of violence
are, however, elided in the narration above. Instead, indigeneity and racial diversity is written
onto the colonizing band.
14
This formulation, like the setter state’s, relies on sliding grammars of
indigeneity. The sign “indigenous Mexican” recognizes Mexican indigeneity but not Gabrielino-
Tongva indigeneity. Again, the “indigenous” Mexican settlers exist as both the Indigenous
peoples of occupied New Spain and the “indigenous” peoples of (the soon to be) occupied
Yaanga. Settler-colonial transit is figured as simply “exploring” the area before deciding to
“settle” at Mission San Gabriel. Rehearsing tropes of colonialism introducing technology,
formalized modes of production, and culture, the authors also write that through the mission the
“indigenous Mexican” settler colonists introduced California’s venerated agricultural products
and practices. Patrick Wolfe writes that agriculture is often central to settler-colonization projects
because “[i]t is inherently sedentary and, therefore, permanent.”
15
Agriculture can be wielded by
settler colonists as means to acquire more Indigenous lands, while generating and supporting
ever-expanding settler political and population economies. In contrast to the settler bios and
settler social forms, Wolfe writes that “natives are typically represented as unsettled, nomadic,

13. Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012), 76.

14. Entries for historicized spaces of violence include Mission San Gabriel, “Yang-Na,” and Downey
Block, a site of the Indigenous slave trade further institutionalized by the US occupation. See Pulido, Barraclough,
and Cheng, A People’s Guide, 106-107, 76, 36-37.

15. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 396.

Mo’e’hahne 88
rootless” in settler discourses. Therefore, “[i]n addition to its objective economic centrality to the
[settler-colonial] project, agriculture, with its life-sustaining connectedness to land, is a potent
symbol of settler-colonial identity.”
16
For Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng, non-Indigenous
agricultural practices and products become of symbol of multi-racial Los Angeles settler
colonialism. Only after the settler-colonists introduced valued agriculture, did they commence
with their pleasant “forays” into the spaces of the future downtown Los Angeles. Through
transit, the settler colonist further transforms the Indigenous land into a symbol of multiracial
colonizing identity.
By interpellating Mexican settlers as always already indigenous, the settler-colonial state
and the leftist knowledge producers seek to sanitize the past, present, and future violence of Los
Angeles settler colonization. By foreground polyraciality, the narratives seek to further mitigate
the violence of colonialism by acknowledging the presence of non-white bodies in the settler-
colonial city. The racial significations also serve as mnemonic devices that further entrench the
largely non-white populations that currently occupy the Gabrielino-Tongva homelands by
connecting non-white socialities to the sites of Los Angeles’s mythic birth (Mission San Gabriel
and El Pueblo) and by extension the entire region. As celebrations of non-white pioneering, the
narrations discursively support the re/creation of ethnic and racial commemorative spaces and,
therefore, settler possessive spatialities. And yet the signification chains of indigeneity would
imply that the actual Indigenous people of the region would be equally represented and
incorporated into the spaces El Pueblo Park. Indigenous worlds, however, are erased and what

16. Ibid.

Mo’e’hahne 89
Thomas King calls the “inconvenient Indian”
17
is discursively subsumed into the colonizing bios.
An imagined pre-US colonial racial harmony of exploration, settlement, and agriculture is
venerated in these public narrations in order to replace the Gabrielino-Tongva and Fernandeño
Tatavium.
Both the pedagogical materials produced by the El Pueblo Park Department and A
People’s Guide offer a story of colonization; however, each narrative temporally and racially
distorts the colonial structures of violence. For example, in A People’s Guide, when violences
perpetrated against the Gabrielino-Tongva by Mexican and Spanish necropolitics are narrated,
the “indigenous Mexican” significations fall out of the text. In other words, the colonists are not
interpellated as “indigenous” Mexicans when they are brutalizing other Indigenous peoples.
Instead, “Anglo” Northern European whiteness becomes the signification of true colonial
violence. According to Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng, Yaanga is only truly destroyed when a
German settler buys the land that the village sits on in the early nineteenth-century and removes
the tribe. Additionally, for the authors, the harshness of the Indigenous slave labor system only
worsens under “American rule.”
18
As I will show, the public narrations put forth by the City of
Los Angeles and the critical geographers elide, distort, and historicize colonization and anti-
Indigenous violence, while naturalizing the colonial past and present through tropes of race and

17. Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

18. For example, Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng write, “Spanish penetration devastated the life-style of
the Tongva and nearly destroyed their population. The pueblo of Los Angeles was founded on or near the site of
Yaanga-Na [sic]…and the Tongva people were coerced form their villages into the Missions…[where] [d]eath by
disease and abuse was widespread...During the Mexican period (1824-1848), the missions were secularized and
many Tongva/Gabrielinos [sic] moved to the growing city of Los Angeles to work, where they formed a cheap and
subordinate labor force that was essential to the city’s growth. In 1828, a German immigrant purchased the land
upon which Yang-Na stood and with the help of the Mexican officials, evicted the entire community…Conditions
grew only worsened under American rule…” Here the multiracial significations are absent as the authors describe
the violence of colonization. Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng A People’s Guide, 70-71.

Mo’e’hahne 90
transit. Such apprehensions of the Indigenous represent the ways that non-white and non-native
leftist politics and critical race praxes can function normatively within the contours of the
Hispanophone and Anglophone origin settler colonialisms. Both the settler state and the
geographers’ narratives are emblematic of the ever-racially-diversifying settler colonial order
(with its racially diverse organs governance and figureheads, represented by politicians like
Gloria Molina, Judy Chu, and Antonio Villaraigosa). These discursive formations are
emblematic of non-native, leftist political orientations in Los Angeles.
19
These narrations are also
representative of the ways that “Indian,” “indigenous,” and “Native” circulate in settler colonial
culture as free-floating signs that can be resignified and invested with multiple, overlapping, and
contradictory meanings that frequently do not correspond to (or signify) the lives of actual
Indigenous peoples (for instance, Rose’s testimony at the begging of the chapter). Perhaps most
importantly, as I will show, these narrations willfully misremember the actual material
conditions of settler colonization, while, at the same time, naturalizing ongoing occupation by
inheriting and rearticulating the logics of settler colonial possession that where inaugurated by
Spanish necropolitics in the eighteenth century.

Torrents of Spanish Violence and the Indigenous Body
The multiracial colonizing band described in A People’s History did not simply arrive at
Yaanga through happenstance “forays” along the borders of Spanish empire. Rather, the settlers
were channeled out of New Spain (present-day Mexico) and into Alta California (present-day

19. Such politics are normative in the ways they conceive of history, redress, and futurity within the
colonizing hegemony while silencing violence against Indigenous peoples. The Los Angeles region and California
more broadly has witness the ascendancy of non-white politicians in recent decades, for instance with the elections
and notable Latinx and Asian/American democratic politicians, who are nevertheless still bound by the logics of
white supremacy as scholars like Leland Saito have demonstrated. See Leland T. Saito, The Politics of Exclusion:
The Failure of Race Neutral-Policies in Urban America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 189-195.
Mo’e’hahne 91
California) as part of the Spanish crown’s elaborate and far-reaching colonization project that
had unfolded over the previous two centuries. Beginning in the late-eighteenth century, Spanish
empire making in the Americas underwent distinct geopolitical and necropolitical shifts
northwest into present-day California. The colonization of Yaanga, therefore, must be read in
relation to the preceding and coterminous Spanish colonial practices throughout New Spain and
its expanding northern borderlands.
Spanish colonialism in the Americas was predicated on the subjection and enslavement of
Indigenous bodies. By the seventeenth century, the slave trades that consumed the Caribbean as
well as Central and South America had extended north into the Desert Southwest and Great
Basin regions of North America (present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado). In
Violence Over the Land, Ned Blackhawk writes that, for example, in 1610, a new colonial center
of power was established in the Santa Fé de Nuevo Mexico province, which then became a
northern slaving center. These necropolitical expansions sent “shockwaves of violence” through
Indigenous lifeworlds, which instituted a new trade in Indigenous bodies.
20
Spanish and Mexican
colonists as well as Indigenous peoples engaged in Indigenous slaving. Indigenous women and
children were the most sought after slaves. In The Other Slavery: The Untold Story of Indian
Enslavement in America, Andres Resendez writes that children were enslaved as domestic
“servants,” while many adult slaves were sent south to labor in Mexican mines. Some Apache

20. Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land, 16-29, 22. For instance, in the Great Basin, Utes traded Paiute
slaves with the New Mexican colonists. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Mexican raiders continued slaving among
Shoshone and Paiute peoples throughout the Great Basin and also traded with Navajos for the captured children of
other tribes. The Mexican slavers would sell Indigenous children in California in exchange for herds of horses and
sheep. They would then trade the livestock for more children captured by Utes and Navajos in a slaving “supply
chain” that spanned California and New Mexico. Boys sold for an average price of $100, while girls, the most
sought after slaves, sold for between $150 and $200, see Resendez, The Other Slavery, 188-194.

Mo’e’hahne 92
slaves were sent as far south central Mexico and then sold into slavery in the Caribbean.
21

According to Blackhawk, “[v]iolence and terror... ordered [these] settler societies” which were
undergirded by “complex [colonial] codes of honor and patriarchy.”
22
Ritualized public displays
of violence were institutionalized throughout the northern borderlands of New Spain through
execution, torture, and the display of severed body parts. The arcs of Spanish colonial violence
rested on and were reproduced through the abjection of the Indigenous body through grotesque
corporeal and psychic brutality. Colonial necropolitics created new spaces of violence in the
numerous Indigenous homelands and lifeworlds it touched. As Blackhawk demonstrates, the
shockwaves of colonial violence often reached Indigenous lifeworlds before colonists and
settlers arrived, principally through the forms of Indigenous slaving and intra-Indigenous
conflicts that resulted from the expanding European necropolitics.
23

Within the boundaries of New Spain, policymakers sought to control local Indigenous
populations through systems of slave and free labor, which functioned concomitantly alongside
the racial castas systems that biopolitcally sorted colonial subjects (for example, through
significations of Creole, Indigenous/Indio, and mestiza/mixed raced categories).
24
During the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the crown sought to protect the valuable Mexican silver

21. According to Resendez, New Spain served as the center for global Spanish slave trades that both defied
and replaced the centuries old intra-Indigenous slaving practices and networks. Indigenous peoples from across the
Americas were trafficked through Mexico, while slaves from Philippines were also trafficked to New Spain and
other American colonies, with heavy slaving occurring in the Muslim majority socialites of the southern archipelago
(for instance, in the region today identified as Mindanao) as well as among the phenotypically darker Indigenous
socialities labeled as “negritos.” See Resendez, The Other Slavery, 134-135.

22. Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land, 23.

23. Ibid.

24. Maria Elena Martinez Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial
Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

Mo’e’hahne 93
mines against attacks from other European colonial powers as well as Indigenous resistance,
primarily the powerful Apache and Comanche socialities. The crown also worked to expanded
colonial, political economies and recruited settlers from across New Spain to repopulate the
northern “frontier” (which, at the time, encompass the present-day US states of Arizona, New
Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Texas).
25
Profits form the Mexican silver mines, which
were the largest producers of silver globally until the eighteenth century, were used to militarize
the northern borderlands. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, a system of
missions and “presidios,” military garrisons that function as prisons for Indigenous labor, were
built from the Atlantic Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Gulf of California (in Baja California). The
missions and garrisons, which followed a similar line to the present-day US-Mexico border,
relied on Indigenous slave labor. Spanish soldiers also worked as slavers to supplement their
income.
26
Across the borderlands, settlers from New Spain were allotted parcels of occupied
Indigenous homelands in the form land grants and ranchos.
27

In the late eighteenth century, working collaboratively with Franciscan orders of the
Catholic church, the crown devised the colonization of Alta California through a network of
missions and pueblos similar to those erected along the northern frontier of New Spain during
the previous century. Alta California, which along with Baja California formed what the crown
administratively identified as Las Californias, was targeted for colonization. (Alta California

25. Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of
the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 107.

26. Resendez The Other Slavery, 196-206.

27. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “The Latino Crucible: Its Origins in Nineteenth-Century Wars, Revolutions, and
Empire,” in Gutierrez, Ramon A., and Almaguer, Tomas, eds. The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First-
Century Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 93-95.

Mo’e’hahne 94
included the present-day US states of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. However, the
Spanish crown and the Viceroy of New Spain never exercised control beyond the networks of
colonies established along the California Pacific coastline.) New Spain aimed to construct a
system of missions or what the crown called “Reductions [centers for converting the Indians],”
military garrisons, and pueblos (“colonial settlements”).
28
The twenty-one mission settler
colonies established in Alta California served multiple objectives of expanding Spanish colonial
hegemony by facilitating settler colonization and creating new political economies to support
New Spain and later the independent Mexican “postcolony.” The colonization projects were
financed by the Spanish crown as the missionaries, soldiers, and the free colonial settlers
recruited to populate the pueblos all received salaries, stipends, and rations. Rather than focusing
on the slaving networks that fed New Spain in the Santa Fé de Nuevo Mexico province, the
California missions sought to locate and maximize Indigenous slave labor within the California
settler colonies and export the surplus materials they produced to the emerging metropole of
New Spain.
Spanish colonists had visited Alta California, including the Yaanga region, throughout
the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. However, official colonization efforts did
not begin until 1769 with creation of Mission San Diego de Alcalá in present-day San Diego,
California. In 1776, seven years after the first Californian mission-garrison-pueblo colony was
constructed, the Viceroy of New Spain granted the northern Mexican frontiers colonies semi-
autonomy by creating a new administrative district, Las Provincias Internas. Las Provincias
Internas became a separate colonial regime organized under a military government that reported

28. Governor Felipe de Neve, “Regalmento: For the Garrisons of the Peninsula of Californias, Erection of
New Missions, and the Fostering of the Colonization and Extensions of Settlements of Monterey” in Nunis, The
Founding Documents of Los Angeles,74.

Mo’e’hahne 95
directly to the crown. It was focused on expanding the Spanish empire further into North
America and generating additional political economies through settler colonization. (Las
Provincias Internas included Las Californias as well as the northern Mexican provinces of
Sonora, Sinaloa, Nueva Vizcaya, Nuevo Mexico, Coahuila and Texas.)
29
The settler colonization
of Alta California and the spaces of violence it created must be considered through these arcs of
colonial necropolitics and governmentality. As the arcs of Spanish colonial violence illustrate,
the Indigenous homelands of Alta California have been apprehended as the sites of future
colonial economies with the potential to enrich the colonial metropole since the mid eighteenth
century. Therefore, it is not surprising that today the occupied Indigenous homelands of
California have been transformed into the largest political economy in the US settler colony and
the six largest political economy globally (preceded by France, Brasil, and the United
Kingdom).
30

Built in 1771, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel was the third mission colony established in
Alta California.
31
The production of Mission San Gabriel also inaugurated Spanish settler
colonialism in the Yaanga region. Mission San Gabriel and later the El Pueblo colony, which

29. Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 376-378. These shifts in Spanish colonial policy were, in part, a
component of what has been termed the “Bourbon Reforms,” which sought to increase the crown’s power over its
subjects and subjected territories. This was carried out through political reforms and colonial-military policies aimed
at increasing the crown’s wealth. For instance, see Anthony McFarelane, “The Bourbon Century” in eds. Francisco
A. Eissa-Barroso and Ainara Vázquez Varela, Early Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten
Era 1700-1759 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 190-191.

30. Chris Nichols, “Does California really have the ‘6th largest economy on planet Earth?’” Politifact.com,
http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2016/jul/26/kevin-de-leon/does-california-really-have-sixth-largest-
economy-/, Tuesday, July 26th, 2016, accessed March 20, 2017.

31. The initial colony was established near the present-day cities of Montebello and Pico Rivera; however,
the settlement was relocated to its present-day location in San Gabriel because of flooding. Jurmain and McCawley,
O’ My Ancestor, 108. Mission San Gabriel was established after Mission San Diego in 1769 and Mission San Carlos
Borromeo del río Carmelo established in 1770, which also placed on top of an Indigenous village in present-day
Monterey, California.
Mo’e’hahne 96
was founded in 1781, were created to fortify colonial lines of transit and communication between
Mission San Diego and Mission San Carlos Borromeo del río Carmelo, the headquarters of the
California mission system (hundreds of miles north of present-day Los Angeles). The colonial
lines of transit that stretched along the California coast were integral to distributing the resources
that the crown extracted from the emerging settler colonies and regimes of Indigenous slave
labor and dispossession.
Colonial administrators at all levels across the Spanish imperial world, from soldiers to
the Viceroy, and the crown, crafted and debated the colonization plans for Alta California. The
colonial archive consists of reports, supply requests, and decrees on where the missions,
garrisons, and colonial pueblos should be placed as well as where the settlers should be recruited
from in occupied New Spain. For example, Governor Felipe de Neve’s Regalmento: For the
Garrisons of the Peninsula of Californias, Erection of New Missions, and the Fostering of the
Colonization and Extensions of Settlements of Monterey, inaugurated the colonizations of Alta
California. In the decree, de Neve described the colonization plans thusly:
With which important object, to secure communication and to draw to the true knowledge
of Religion to the numerous Gentiles that inhabit the indispensable strait and perilous
pass of the Channel of Santa Barbara [Las Californias], it is decided to occupy it:
establishing a Post and three Missions, with a Pueblo which, being nearby, can supply
said Post and that of San Diego with Provisions from the product of its crops.
32

de Neve order Alta California to be occupied and missions constructed so that lines of
communication and transit could be established throughout the network of mission-garrison-
pueblo settler colonies. The “numerous Gentiles” that de Neve order to be introduced “the true
knowledge of Religion” where the Indigenous slave laborers that supported and sustained the
settler colonies. Indigenous labor was used construct the missions, garrisons, and pueblos as well

32. Governor Felipe de Neve, “Regalmento,” in Nunis, The Founding Documents of Los Angeles, 74-75.

Mo’e’hahne 97
as produce grain and consumer good, such as textiles, to be exported. Capturing children and
women in order to force Indigenous communities into slavery was common practice throughout
the California missions.
33
Oral histories of Luiseno and Kumeyaay people drawn into Mission
San Diego’s “violent orbit” describe how the Franciscans would force Indians into servitude
through capturing their children.
34
The missionaries would take children to a place in the
mountains known as the “Crying Rock” and drop the children to their death if the parents did not
come to mission and work.
35
The Spaniards at mission San Diego abducted and raped
Indigenous women regularly. They also stole and destroyed the Kumeyaay’s food, thereby
further threatening Indigenous survival. Fr. Junípero Serra, the architect of the California
missions, similarly described Spanish practices of capturing Gabrielino-Tongva women at
Mission San Gabriel:
In the morning, six or more soldiers would set out together, with or without the
permission of their corporal, on horseback, and go to the distant rancherias…When both
men and women at the sight of them took to their heels…the soldiers, clever as they are
at passing cows and mules, would catch Indian women with their lassos to become prey
for their unbridled lust. At times some Indian men would try to defend their wives, only
to be shot down with bullets.
36

Indigenous women were regarded as animals to be lassoed and transformed into “prey” for the
violent, colonizing, male sexuality, or for Fr. Serra, simply the colonists’ “unbridled lust.”

33. Jackson and Castillo Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 107.

34. Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land, 25.

35. Oral histories tell that at Mission San Diego Indigenous laborers were fitted with collars and made to
pull wagons and plows like livestock. One man escaped and returned home with his collar, which the family
removed and kept for a time. Rupert Coston and Jeannette Henry Costo ed. The Missions of California: A Legacy of
Genocide (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1987), 151-153.

36. Quoted in Edward Castillo, “The Native response to the Colonization of Alta California,” in David H.
Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences (Washington, D.C., 1989); Antonine Tibesar, OFM, trans. and ed. Writings
of Junipero Serra (Washington, D.C., 1955)1:362-63; all cited in Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo. Indians,
Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 74-75.

Mo’e’hahne 98
Drawn from villages throughout Southern California, thousands of Gabrielino-Tongva people,
were enslaved at Mission San Gabriel. Indigenous labor reduced the government costs of
maintaining the colonies. The missions became nearly self-sufficient settler slave plantations and
surplus grain was used to propel the political and necro-economies of the New Spain and later
supported the Mexican war for independence (1810-1821).
37
Under Spanish colonialism, the
logic of elimination was operationalized through slavery, agriculture, and forced conversion to
culturally and necropolitically liquidate Indigenous societies.

Colonizing Yaanga
Colonial administrators had visited and observed Yaanga for several years before
ordering the construction of a colony on top of the village. Yaanga was chosen as the site for the
next colony because the village was a large, long established community that could be brought
into the settlement’s violent orbit and provide Indigenous labor. Population estimates for Yaanga
range from several hundred to a thousand people. The village was located next to the river the
Spanish had renamed Porciuncula, which the colonists intended to irrigate. (Today, the river
exists as the concrete filled, polluted, and diminished Los Angeles River).
In 1769, three years before the building of Mission San Gabriel, Fr. Juan Crespí visited
Yaanga (which the Spanish had identified as “Yabit”). Crespí renamed the village Nuestra
Señora de Los Angeles de la Porciuncula (after the river previous Spanish colonists had
renamed). Crespí wrote that “a fine rancheria” of “very docile and friendly” Indians occupied the
spot. According to Crespí, the Indians were the “cleanest we have seen” and apparently were

37. Jackson and Castillo Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 44-46, 107.

Mo’e’hahne 99
friendly with the padres and wanted them to stay.
38
By figuring the Indigenous as clean and
docile (a trope of colonial Indian figuration perhaps inaugurated by Columbus) and, therefore,
receptive to Spanish colonial will, Crespí justified the colonization of Yaanga by tethering it to a
Christianizing program. Crespí’s descriptions of the villagers of “Yabit” likely circulated
throughout New Spain. In 1779, the frontier commander general of Las Californias, Teodoro de
Croix, visited Yaanga and also described the villagers as “docile and without malice.” Hearing
this, Felipe de Neve, the administrator who ordered and oversaw the California missionization-
militarization project, traveled to Yaanga in the spring of 1781 and selected three dozen boys and
girls for conversion. de Neve became the godfather of twelve of the children that were
“baptized.” According to Andres Resendez, in colonial New Mexico, Spanish and Mexican
colonists used the familial category of “godparent” to become the legal guardian and, therefore,
the owner of enslaved Indigenous children that they had purchased or adducted. Operating within
similar regimes of Indigenous servitude, we can speculate that the children Governor de Neve
“baptized” represent some of the first villagers of Yaanga to be enslaved.
39

The crown originally intended to build a mission on top of Yaanga. However, with the
shifting practices of settler colonization in Las Californias, the crown ordered a pueblo built
instead. According to Harry Kelsey, the building of the pueblos represented a radical break in the
missionization-militarization project by decoupling the practices of Indigenous conversion from
the Catholic Friars. In Kelsey’s estimation, Governor de Neve’s proclamations on the founding
of the pueblo colonies can be interpreted as emphasizing a degree of Indigenous autonomy,

38. Harry Kelsey, “A New Look at the Founding of Los Angeles,” in Doyce B. Nunis ed. The Founding
Documents of Los Angeles, 5.

39. Ibid. In preparation for the arrival of the settler colonists from New Spain, de Neve chose a “young
married couple” from Yaanga to be remarried and baptized. de Neve then renamed them after himself, a common
(Spanish) colonial practice: Felipe de Neve and Phelipa Theresa de Neve.

Mo’e’hahne 100
rather the complete servitude that was practiced at the missions. Under de Neve’s 1781 orders,
for instance, Christian Indians were no longer required to live at the missions. Instead, they
would live in the racherias and pueblos. According to de Neve, one reason for creating the
pueblos was to “hasten the conversion…of the countless pagans.” According to Commandant
General de Croix, one of the main duties of the Los Angeles settlers was “to attract Indian’s
joyfully by the practice of true justice and good example of the knowledge of our Sacred
Religion.”
40
While the creation of the Los Angeles and other pueblo colonies may have been
recorded in the colonial archive as a program that carried out to spread Christianity, reading the
texts in this way overlooks the ways that Christianity was used to practice forms of Indigenous
slavery and violently reorder Indigenous lifeworlds. It is undeniable that Christianization
accompanied and facilitated colonial necropolitics and, as I will show, the afterlives of these
Christianizing violences continue bleed into the twenty-first-century spatial politics of El Pueblo.

Race, Reproduction, and the Settler-Colonizing Bios
As part of the project of “Fostering of the Colonization and Extension of the Settlements”
into the Yaanga region, the crown recruited forty-four “pobladores” (settlers) from the Sonora
and Sinaloa provinces of New Spain to populate El Pueblo de Los Angeles colony.
41
The crown
provided settlers and their families with months of food rations, supplies, and livestock for their
journey. After a brief stent at Mission San Gabriel, the settlers arrived at Yaanga in September
1781 and El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciuncula colony was
established. The settlers were biopolitically organized around eleven male-headed households.

40. Ibid.

41. Governor Felipe de Neve, “Regalmento,” 74.

Mo’e’hahne 101
Once they arrived at the colony, the settlers were provided with additional supplies and food
rations. Male heads of households where assigned parcels of irrigated lands for farming and town
lots were assigned for dwellings. The crown began confirming land titles to male settlers in
1786.
42

The original forty-four settlers were comprised of twenty-two adults and twenty-two
children. The settlers were “racially” diverse and were interpellated by the crown according to
the gendered, sexed, and raced castas system employed in New Spain. Approximately half of the
settlers where of Afro-Mexican heritage, recorded as either “Negro” and “Multa/o” (the child of
a Spanish father and Negro mother) in the colonial census. The remaining settlers were recorded
as “Indian,” “Spaniard,” or “Metizo” (the child of a Spanish father and Indian mother). The
sexual and gender norms of the settler-colonizing band captured in the colonial archive depict
heterosexual patterns of racial coupling and reproduction. Male Spanish blood and female Negro
blood did not mix, as Spanish men only “married” Indian women. Whereas Negra/os and
Multa/os only married others of Negro, Indian, or Mestiza blood.
43
The racial composition of the
settlers also demonstrates that when Indigenous people, here identified as “Indian,” participated
in Spanish settler-colonization projects their Indigeneity to other spaces did not preclude them
occupying the position of a colonial settler in another. In other words, Indigeneity does not undo
complicity with colonialism, even if such settling subjects occupied a rigidly structured agency
in the colonial metropole of New Spain, which might have lead them to accept the Spanish
crown’s “invitation” to colonize and occupy Gabrielino-Tongva homelands. In official Spanish

42. Kelsey, “A New Look at the Founding of Los Angeles,” 6-19.

43. Census of the population of the “Padrón of Los Angeles,” September 24, 1871 in Nunis, The Founding
Documents of Los Angeles, 161-164.

Mo’e’hahne 102
documents, the colonial administrators, however, referred to California pueblo colonies (that
were comprised of multiracial settlers) as “the Pueblos of White people.”
44
In the eyes of the
crown, the Negro, Mulata, Indian, and Mestiza settling subjects were ostensibly considered
white. Thus, “[i]n the name of his Majesty (whom God preserve),” the male, nominally white
settlers were given “possession” (in the form of title) of the Gabrielino-Tongva homelands that
the crown had “allotted” to them.
45
Through the Spanish crown’s biopolitical investment in and
management of the yeoman farmer settler family, multiracial heterosexual reproduction became
the biopolitical form through which the Gabrielino-Tongva of Yaanga were dispossessed. This
configuration of settler-colonial sexuality, therefore, depended on the reproduction of non-white
and multiracial bios in order to replace the Gabrielino-Tongva. All biopolitical regimes of non-
Indigenous hetero/sexual reproduction that have arisen on top of Yaanga since 1781, therefore,
further the logics of multiracial settlement and replacement that were set in motion by the
Spanish crown. (I investigate these biopolitical/necropolitical formations further in chapter four.)
In a sense, the public narrations of Los Angeles’s colonial history offered by the City of
Los Angeles and Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng accurately represent the settlers “racially.”
However, these narrations ignore the forms colonial entitlement and possession that the
multiracial settlers were afforded by the Spanish crown, both alongside and through “racial”
difference. By emphasizing race rather than colonization, these formulations obscure the world-
altering arcs of violence that brought colonial settlers to Yaanga and dispossessed the

44. For example, the proclamation that assigned land titles to Spanish and Mexican settlers reads:
“…proceedings should be started for the exact fulfillment of giving possession to the citizens of the aforesaid Pueblo
de la Reyna de los Angeles, in the name of his Majesty (who God preserve), of the town lots and sections of land
which are assigned to them in accordance…[with] the Royal Regulations of this Province for the Pueblos of White
People,” “Confirmation of the Titles to Pueblo Lands, Monterey, August 14, 1786,” in Nunis, The Founding
Documents of Los Angeles, 165-166.

45. Ibid.
Mo’e’hahne 103
Gabrielino-Tongva. The specificity of Gabrielino-Tongva Indigeneity, and the relations to space,
time, and land that accompany it, are thus excluded from public history and memory. As a
category of personhood that does not register in the multiracial, pioneering discourses of Los
Angeles settler colonialism, the villagers of Yaanga are abjected within hegemonic
understandings of the settler-colonial past and settler-colonial present. Furthermore, settler-
colonial agricultural practices, represented by the settlers’ allotted plots of Gabrielino-Tongva
land, as Patrick Wolfe writes, enabled the settler-colonial “population to be expanded by
[continual] immigration at the expense of native lands and livelihoods,” whereas “[t]he
inequities, contradictions and pogroms of metropolitan society [in this case, of occupied New
Spain and later the Mexican postcolony] ensure a recurrent supply of fresh immigrants—
especially…from among the landless.” In the case of colonizing Yaanga, the landless subjects
fleeing pogroms of metropolitan society perhaps included the displaced and disposed Indigenous
peoples of the New Spain colonies and their descendants (who would become
Mexican/Americans and “Chicanos” in the coming centuries).
46
In the case of the Spanish
mission project and the Los Angeles colony, agriculture propelled by Indigenous slave labor,
sustained the Iberian, Creole, and Mexican colonizing bios, while supporting and expanding
colonial political economies throughout New Spain and its northern borderlands, including the
Californias. In New Spain’s operationalization of the logic of elimination, rather than being
liquidated through mass murder, Indigenous peoples were transformed into laboring
subject/objects whose lives and deaths supported the settler-colonial population and political
economies. Furthermore, as Wolfe has theorized, settler colonization through agriculture
transforms the denigrate and landless metropolitan subject fleeing the “contradictions…of

46. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 396.

Mo’e’hahne 104
metropolitan society,” in this case, the multiracial Sonoran colonist, into a yeoman farming
settler subject in a new colonial context. In this historical context, New Spain/present day
Mexico was becoming a Spanish colonial metropole in the Americas wherein Creole,
Indigenous, and Mestizo subjects experienced differential biopolitical life chances and
enfranchisements within the internal colonial order. As a result of these hierarchies, the subjects
of New Spain sought to escape the machinations of colonial violence through settler migrations
to New Spain’s northern borderlands (New Mexico, Texas, and the Californias, and in this case
Yaanga) where they would be given Indigenous lands to occupy, cultivate, and eventually
possess.
47
Through the auspices of the Spanish crown, the Mexican-origin settler subject to Los
Angeles exercised providence over the unproductive Indigenous lands and transformed them
through farming, thereby giving them value and utility. In occupied Yaanga, rather than
eliminating the Native in order to practice settler agriculture, the Native is eliminated through
settler agriculture.

“The Indigenous Body in Pain” at Yaanga
Ned Blackhawk writes that “[e]lusive and yet omnipresent, [Indigenous] pain remains an
uncommon subject of historical inquiry.” Thinking through Elaine Scarry’s formulations,
Blackhawk argues that such analytic and historiographic silences “necessitate deeper
documentation and interpretive attention” to “[c]olonialism’s effects upon such indigenous
bodies in pain.”
48
Gabrielino-Tongva lives in Yaanga are opaquely rendered in the Spanish
colonial archives and the generations of colonial historiography that were produced from them.

47. Gutiérrez, “The Latino Crucible,” 93-95.

48. Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land, 8.

Mo’e’hahne 105
The Indigenous is figured as an absence rather than a presence. For instance, Yaanga is not
visually represented in the plans that Spanish colonial administrators drafted to carve out La
Plaza and La Placita, the first colonial structures erected at El Pueblo, or to assign the tracts of
land allotted to settlers. It is unclear if the colony was constructed beside or on top of the village,
although some historians have concluded that the colony was in fact placed on top of the
village.
49
The relative absence of Indigenous figures and Gabrielino-Tongva lives in the
“recorded” history of the founding of El Pueblo colony symbolically reflects the necropolitical
forces that worked to obliterate the inhabitants of Yaanga and decimated the Indigenous
populations of the region. The colony grew to consume Yaanga and subsumed its inhabitants
through repressive labor practices and Christianization. The inhabitants were conscripted into
laboring in the colony, building the structures of the settlement, and serving as the primary
source of agricultural labor that sustained the growing settler bios. New Spain and later Mexico
continued the Indigenous slave trade, separate from missions, well into the mid nineteenth
century. The “Old Spanish Trail” that was established centuries earlier and cut through the
Desert Southwest was eventually extended to Los Angeles, thereby, connecting it with Santa Fé.
The trail was increasingly used to traffic Indigenous slaves that were captured and traded
throughout Las Californias and Nuevo Mexico de Santa Fé province.
50

The violence of colonizing Yaanga can also be understood through the violence of
Mission San Gabriel. Approximately 6,000 Indigenous people form an array of Southern
California tribes perished and are/were buried at the mission, as the unearthing and discarding of

49. Kelsey, “A New Look at the Founding of Los Angeles,” 5.

50. Resendez, The Other Slavery, 191-193.

Mo’e’hahne 106
corporeal remains have accompanied colonial building practices near and on the site over the
centuries.
51
Many Indigenous people incarcerated in the mission(s) died of poor nutrition and
starvation. Children and young women had the highest mortality rates. Due to the carceral
conditions of the missions, the Gabrielino-Tongva people experienced a population collapse by
the late-eighteenth century, as did all Indigenous peoples laboring in the California missions. The
labor practices caused a massive population decline, rather than disease as many public histories
have claimed. The carcerality of the missions also produced great psychological trauma, which
contributed to high Indigenous mortality. According to Robert Jackson and Edward Castillo,
“[t]he general depression among the Indian population manifest itself in several forms.
Stress…weaken[ed] the immune system, contributing to the phenomenon described by some
observers as natives giving up the ghost and simply laying down to die” (emphasis added).
52

These incarcerated, tortured, and dying Indigenous subjects resemble the death-bound
Muselmänner produced in the Nazi death camps, which for Giorgio Agamben represent the
ultimate subjected category of “bare life.” Agamben theorizes the emergence of “homo sacer,”
through filial relations of subjectivity with patriarchal sovereign power wherein homo sacer is
violently excluded from the bios through the “state of exception” and thus abandoned to die as
pure bare life. Such filial relations between bios and sovereign power, however, were never
extended to the Indigenous liminal subjects that were drawn into the necro-economies of Yaanga
and Mission San Gabriel to begin with. Because the Indigenous people of the Yaanga region
were never part of the colonizing bios and polis, they could not be excluded from it and

51. Valdez Singleton, “Surviving Urbanization,” 50.

52. The settlers living the presidios that surrounded the mission as well as the missionaries did not,
however, experience comparable mortality rates. Jackson and Castillo Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish
Colonization, 44-46, 53.
Mo’e’hahne 107
subsequently rendered bare life by transiting the subject position of homo sacer. For as Achille
Mbembe reminds us, colonies “are inhabited by ‘savages,’” that are not part of the “human
world.”
53
Savage non-humans, therefore, cannot be excluded from the bios or topos in which
they were never included. The “zone of indistinction,” theorized by Agamben, can only been
inhabited by subjects whose bare life was first transubstantiated into bios (humanity) and then
stripped away. Agamben’s “inclusive exclusion” of bare life thus has no theoretical purchase in
the settler-colonial political order of Yaanga or Mission San Gabriel.
54

Under Spanish control and later Mexican independence, Los Angeles was transformed
into the center of the repressive regimes of Indigenous slave labor and indentured servitude. It,
therefore, became a center for Indigenous migration throughout the region. According to George
Harwood Philips, “from 1781 to the 1870s, the white residents of Los Angeles relied almost
exclusively on Indian labor.”
55
The category white ostensibly referred to anyone that was non-
Indigenous. Indigenous people were gradually manumitted during the secularization of the
missions, a process which released the missions from the formal control of the church and the
Mexican state that unfolded between 1826 and 1840. Many freed Indigenous people in Southern
California migrated to Los Angeles where they found themselves laboring in similar conditions
of servitude and indenture. The Mexican/Californio settlers throughout the region who sought
the low-wage or indentured Indigenous labors argued over where the newly manumitted
Indigenous labor would the channeled and allocated.
56
With the massive freeing of Indigenous

53. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 41.

54. Ibid., 41; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7.

55. George Harwood Philips “Indians in Los Angeles, 1781-1875: Economic Integration, Social
Disintegration,” Pacific Historical Review, 49 no. 4 (1980), 449.

56. Jackson and Castillo Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 91-95.

Mo’e’hahne 108
slaves at the missions, Mexican colonial administrators soon passed laws institutionalizing
Indian slave labor by targeting Indigenous “vagrancy.” Any Indigenous person found
unemployed was fined and incarcerated. Indigenous migrants were often unable to pay fines and
were jailed. They would then be auctioned off to Mexican settlers as “servants” and “day
laborers.”
57
Furthermore, in order to be legally employed, Indigenous people had to receive
government work certificates. Those found without certificates were also arrested and auctioned
off to Mexican settlers. Mexican settlers and colonial administrators also passed laws against
public Indian drunkenness, in part, because of the high instances of public violence towards
Indigenous peoples and frequent Indian murders in the streets. The countless Indian murders in
Los Angeles were recorded as having been perpetrated by other Native people. Indigenous
people who were charged with public drunkenness were sentenced to hard labor on public works
projects or sold off to private citizens. The Mexican settlers also spatially confined Indigenous
people living and dying in the Los Angeles colony to several blocks of present-day downtown
identified as the “Indian Rancheria.” However, Mexican settlers complained of the frequent
intra-Indigenous violence and murders and passed an ordinance in 1845 relocating the Indian
“Pueblito” across the river to the spaces occupied by the present-day Mexican/American
majority neighborhood of Boyle Heights. However, through formulations of settler-colonial
hetero/sexuality, the settlers soon petitioned the Governor of California to destroy the Indian
Pueblito because it was a source of “vice” and “polygamy.” In 1847, a year before the US
occupation began, the Indian Pueblito was destroyed and the remaining Indigenous migrants to
Los Angeles were forced to find permanent work for private settlers as servants and laborers or
face arrest and public auction. Under the new ordinance, the Indigenous laborers were also

57. Harwood Philips, “Indians in Los Angeles, 1781-1875,” 449.
Mo’e’hahne 109
required to live with their employers, which further strengthened relations of Indigenous
bondage. For the multiracial and Mexican settlers of occupied Yaanga, the Indigenous were
regarded as both a corporeal commodity that feed and sustained the colony and an abjectable
social pollutant that threatened settler regimes of sexuality that must be forced into forms of
domestic and indentured servitude.
58

The torrents of violence and Indigenous slaving continued under the US occupation,
which began in 1848. Similar laws against public drunkenness and vagrancy were passed, which
resulted in further de facto Indian slavery. According to Harwood Philips, Indians that labored
for wages had to compete for the low paying domestic jobs. If one was killed or died another
took their place. If they fell ill, Indian labors would be left in the street to die. Indigenous people
also labored in the colony’s most important sectors: they worked the profitable vineyards,
maintained the irrigation systems, and were indispensable to the fall harvests. Throughout the
first several decades of the US occupation, there was such an abundance of cheap Indian labor
that white settlers to LA County had trouble finding work, which lead some to migrate East to
Texas. However, the harsh de facto slave-labor conditions eventually decimated the Indigenous
populations laboring under the US occupation.
59
The US colonists continued to arrest Indigenous
people for public drunkenness and they were auction off, while others were arrested for theft,
rape, or murder and were whipped, imprisoned, and executed. Many Indigenous prisoners also
paid their fines to avoid enslavement. The colonial government, in fact, covered much of its
operating budget with Indian fines. According to Harwood Philips, throughout the eighteen
fifties, seldom a week went by without the local newspapers reporting incidents of Indigenous

58. Ibid., 438-439.

59. Ibid., 445.

Mo’e’hahne 110
violence and crime. Bodies of dead and mutilated Indigenous people, many of whom had their
“heads bashed in,” littered the streets of Los Angeles. Nearly all the deaths went unsolved as the
Los Angeles coroner usually concluded “death by violence from persons unknown.”
60

Newspaper reporting and US legal discourses always attributed the violence and deaths to other
Indians. For example, the Los Angeles Star reported on September 13, 1856, “Indians continue to
kill each other. One or two instances of stabbings have come under our notice this week.”
Through a masculine rendering of white gendered violence, the author concluded that killing
could not be attributed to white actors: “[w]e cannot learn that any white person had developed
his manhood within the last seven days.”
61

The systems of slave labor institutionalized under US occupation resulted in another
Indigenous population collapse in Southern California by 1870. The Indigenous population was
reduced from 3,693 in 1850 to 219 in 1870. Indian labor had to be imported from other regions
of California.
62
“The resident Indians, it seems,” Harwood Philips concludes, “were caught not
so much in a vicious circle as in a downward spiral from which few escaped or survived.”
63

Many Mexican settlers were eventually “dispossessed” of their stolen Indigenous land holdings
and “Anglo-Mexican” violence increased under the US occupation.
64
However, the Indigenous

60. Ibid., 440-441.

61. Cited in Harwood Philips, “Indians in Los Angeles,” 485.

62. Ibid., 449.

63. Ibid., 449, 451.

64. William Deverell argues that the conditions of “conflict” between the Mexican and US colonial nation
states over the occupied Alta California and Desert Southwest did not end in 1848 but unfolded through continual
forms of racialized conflict and discursive formations. William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los
Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 12-25; According to
Tomás Almaguer the “lighter skinned” mixed race Mexican settlers that had been given large grants by the Spanish
crown and Mexican state, could keep their possession under US occupation were eventually dispossessed through
Mo’e’hahne 111
body existed as corporeal commodity to be exploited, traded, and denigrated by all three colonial
regimes that engulfed and occupied Yaanga.

La Plaza and Olvera Street: Re/producing Colonial Space through Time
William David Estrada writes that the grids of El Pueblo’s calles as well as the placement
of La Plaza and the La Placita—the site of present-day El Pueblo Park— were planned by
colonial administrators in accordance with the desires of the magistrates in both New Spain and
the Iberian metropole.
65
Like all Spanish colonial settlements of the eighteenth century, La Plaza
was the most important spatial form in the colony. Within this geometry, La Plaza was the
symbolic center of the colony, where all paths cut out from and where all subjects would be
channeled into as they moved through the settlement.
66
Carving up the land through the practices
of early colonial settlement—producing the grids of the calles— functioned as a terrestrial and
spatial analogue for the social, cultural, and corporeal violence of carving up, cutting into, and
reshaping of Indigenous subjects, bodies, and lifeworlds through colonization.
With Gabrielino-Tongva spatial presence virtually erased, La Plaza remained an
important symbolic space for occupying Spanish and Mexican colonists until the mid nineteenth
century. When the US occupation began, the institutions of El Pueblo continued to function and

intermarriage with male “Anglo” settlers and de jure legal means. See Tomás Almaguer, Racial fault lines : the
historical origins of white supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 59, 80-1.

65. William David Estrada The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2008),15-31.

66. These practices of planning and constructing colonial towns, plazas, and garrisons under Spanish
colonialism had been transported to sites of settlement and reworlding across the globe including the Americas as
well as the Philippines, such that colonial settlements throughout would share similarities in physical appearance
and symbolic ordering. See Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 17.

Mo’e’hahne 112
La Plaza remained an important political space. However, with the ascendancy of white
American hegemony, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the spaces of El Pueblo
had become home to non-natives vagrants of the racialized underclass, primarily Mexican
settlers. Olvera Street, which had functioned as a commercial space during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, had by the early twentieth century become a Mexican slum.
67
Olvera Street
was not transformed into the tourist oriented commercial space that exits today until Christine
Sterling, a wealthy, white philanthropist from San Francisco, visited Los Angeles in the nineteen
twenties and found the former commercial in space disrepair. In the early nineteen thirties,
Sterling lobbied Los Angeles to pass legislation to redevelop Olvera Street and restore the
historic structures. Sterling funded the project and the city also provided prison labor complete
the construction. Olvera Street reopened as Mexican-oriented arcade space in the early nineteen-
thirties. Reflecting on the tourist arcade of Olvera Street in the nineteen seventies, Oscar Zeta
Acosta, the self-identified Chicano and Los Angeles based writer and activist, wrote: “On Olvera
Street, the vendors of Mexican food, Mexican clothes, serapes, ponchos, glass dolls, leather
boots, dresses for dancing corridos, the old Mexican men and woman sell their wares to the
tourists.”
68
Olvera Street represented one of the first twentieth century acts of settler-colonial
urban redevelopment in Los Angeles. Importantly, it established patterns of “ethnic” themed
commerce and tourist driven development that would shape El Pueblo Park well into the twenty-
first century.

67. Yet La Plaza remained an important space for Los Angeles politics. For instance, in the early twentieth-
century the communist party and other leftist political organizations would hold regular meetings at La Plaza. See
Ibid., 17-19.

68. Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Revenge of the Cockroach People.1973. (New York: Vintage, 1989), 59.

Mo’e’hahne 113
Mid-Twentieth-Century Settler Urban Re/development and Tourism
By the mid nineteen sixties, the City of Los Angeles began working towards
redeveloping El Pueblo State Historic Park. Plans for redeveloping the park emerged in the wake
of the first massive urban redevelopment projects in downtown Los Angeles that had begun after
the Second World War. Practices of remaking urban settler space through urban redevelopment
embody and extend the spatial and biopolitical reworlding practices that characterize settler
colonial societies, in both the frontier and post frontier eras. Lorenzo Veracini argues that
patterns of remaking occupied Indigenous lands in settler colonies represent “turning-of-the-
world-inside-out” formations. Settler formations are, accordingly, based on the premise that
safety and prosperity can be obtained by creating new worlds through settler expansion rather
than reforming existing social orders in the colonial metropole.
69
Reflecting on settler urbanism
in the US and Australia, Veracini writes that settler anxieties surrounding urban, racialized
danger and the decline of urban economies generate patterns of settler mobility that, through
white-flight, produce settler suburbanization. Veracini observes that such formations rehearse the
initial settler colonial expansions through suburbanization (formations I that also examine further
in chapter four).
70
In Los Angeles, settler suburbanization occurred at the same time as large-
scale urban renewal and redevelopment projects in the early postwar years. These projects sought
to create new desirable and profitable spaces to serve nominally white suburban settler subjects
who could drive to the remade urban spaces to shop and work and then retreat to the suburbs.
These projects included the demolition of tracts of tenement housing and the removal of the low

69. Veracini, “Suburbia, Settler Colonialism and the World Turned Inside Out,” Housing, Theory and
Society, 29 no. 4, 339-357(2012) 340.

70. Ibid.,

Mo’e’hahne 114
income, multiethnic residents in the neighborhood of Bunker Hill, a few blocks away from El
Pueblo Park. The communities and structures of Bunker Hill would be replaced by rigidly
planned and commercially oriented forms, including office buildings, and later in the nineteen
seventies experimental commercial structures like the Bonaventure building (lauded by Edward
Soja).
71
During the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, Bunker Hill was home to many
Indigenous migrants who were channeled into Los Angeles through settler-state relocation policy
(spaces and times I explore further in chapter two). In redeveloping Bunker Hill, colonial
administrators and settler capital were responding to anxieties about new waves of migration and
sought to produce more desirable sites for settlement and commerce; whereas in the case of El
Pueblo, developers and politicians sought to reinscribe normative understandings of colonial
history through settler place-making, while also bolstering colonial tourism and appealing to
more than just white suburban subjects.
By the mid nineteen-sixties, the City of Los Angeles, with the support of the county and
state governments, hired several development firms to produce plans for redeveloping El Pueblo
Park. (The Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, publicly championed the redevelopment, for
instance, making it the theme of the 1971 governor’s ball.
72
) The city sought to transform the

71. From the early postwar era to the mid 1970s following federal legislation passed in 1949, urban renewal
policy was used to remove racially and economically undesired communities throughout the United States through
federally funded but locally planned urban redevelopment projects that often-favored settler capital. See John Levy,
Contemporary Urban Planning (New York: Routledge, 1991), 174-181.

72. Plans to redevelop El Pueblo park circulated publicly in the annals of colonial governance. For
example, the Fourth Annual Heritage Governor’s Ball for Ronald Reagan was held in Beverly Hills in 1971. Reagan
made the founding of Los Angeles and the revitalization of El Pueblo Park the theme of his ball. The program for
the heritage ball included a history of El Pueblo that textually recreated the moment of colonial encounter, through
tropes of raciality and pioneering like the twenty-first century narrations I analyzed earlier. However, the governor’s
office invests the founding of the colony with distinct forms of settler-reproductive futurity: “Los Angeles was born
on September 4, 1781, when the first settlers…were camped on the west bank of a river” [emphasis added]. Further
emphasizing race, gendered hierarchies, and heterosexual reproductive imperatives of settler colonialism, Reagan’s
office wrote that the founding male heads of families were “men of Indian, Spanish, and Negro ancestry.” Reagan’s
office continues: “The founding of Los Angeles consisted—probably—of tired and dusty people unpacking mules
Mo’e’hahne 115
park, which reportedly attracted over two million visitors annually, into an even larger “tourist”
and “leisure” destination that could be added to the list of other Southern California attractions,
such as “Disneyland, Universal City, and the Farmers’ Market.” Government planners also
wanted to increase the symbolic presence of Los Angeles’s “multi-cultural” history as well as the
presence Los Angeles’s contemporary “ethnic groups” in the park, primarily
Mexicans/Americans but the developers also called for the indirect incorporation of
Japanese/American and Chinese/American communities in the redevelopment.
73
The 1970 El
Pueblo State Park Comprehensive Development Plan, for instance, included proposals to expand
the park and build a web of structures that included shopping malls, restaurants, cultural centers,
and parking. Planners sought “revitalize” the adjacent ethnic commercial and tourist sites of
Chinatown and Little Tokyo. Pedestrian pathways and a new light rail-tram system would
connect El Pueblo Park with the new shopping centers, Chinatown, and Little Tokyo. The
planners, however, figured El Pueblo park as the central tourist “hub” and main attraction.
74
(The

and being assigned house and farm lots by Corporal Feliz under plans worked out in August at San Gabriel with
Felipe de Neve. They were likely observed by the Indians from Yang-na [sic], the adjoining village—apparently
located in the area of the present City Hall.” Like the twenty-first century narrations, Reagan’s office elides the
torrents of violence and represents the creation of the colony as an informal act carried out by pioneering “tired and
dusty people” who made a journey to receive plots of land. The land is apprehended as available even with the
presence of Indigenous people. However, Yaanga is represented as the “adjoining village” rather than a separate,
Indigenous community. It is, therefore, already assumed to be part of the colony. The non-tribally specific
Indigenous people are represented as passive observers and willing recipients of the colonial arrival, similar to Fr.
Crespí’s eighteenth-century writings. However, the Indigenous disappears from the remainder of the governor’s
narration of Los Angeles history. Redemptive multiracial settlement, Indigenous settlers, and disappearing local
Indians are found throughout the storied settler context of reworlding Yaanga. See “El Pueblo de Los Angeles State
Historic Park: The Fourth Annual Heritage Governor’s Ball Honoring Governor and Mrs. Ronald Reagan,”
September 22, 1971.

73. However, the planners pointed out that El Pueblo would be a destination with educational, cultural, and
historical importance. El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park Comprehensive Development Plan, City of Los
Angeles, State of California, County of Los Angeles, Prepared by Pollak, Barsocchini & Associates; Development
Research Associates, and Robert Crommelin and Associates, November 1970, 3.

74. Plans outlined a network of cultural tourist destinations in downtown that included Chinatown, Little
Tokyo, and the music center—in the nearby Civic Center district—as well as shopping centers that would be built in
Bunker Hill. “Comprehensive Development Plan,” 19, iv, 16, 24-29.

Mo’e’hahne 116
planners also included proposals to close several city blocks and increase the transit
infrastructure of Union Station, which sits across the street from El Pueblo park.)
By 1970, city planners viewed Chinatown and Little Tokyo as potential tourist
destinations for imagined white and non-white visiting public alike in relation to the nominally
“Spanish” and “Mexican” spaces of El Pueblo. The creation of Chinatown and Little Tokyo as
contained racialized spaces, however, was in fact the result of overlapping forms settler-spatial
biopolitics, which included the exclusion and relocation of different non-Indigenous
communities throughout nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These spatial biopolitics were also
formed through historic and ongoing forms Indigenous abjection, as the spaces that housed the
Indigenous slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth

century would be transformed into Little
Tokyo (as well as Boyle Heights) in the early-twentieth century, for instance, due to an influx of
Japanese migrants. During the Second World War, the same spaces became home to an African
American community following Japanese interment. De jure and de facto housing and
employment restrictions created Chinatown in the mid to late nineteenth century, resulting in
episodes of racialized violence and the eventual relocation of Chinatown in order to build Union
Station (the colony’s central transit hub) in the twentieth century. Urban biopolitical and
spatialized difference produced through Indigenous dispossession represent what Penelope
Edmonds calls the hierarchies of bodies and spaces that comprise the “settler-colonial city.”
75

Contrary to the ways settler colonialism is normatively represented as unfolding in the rural
spaces and imaginaries of the frontier, urban settler formations of spatial and corporeal violence
represent the nomos of settler societies. According to Edmonds, categories of valued and

75. Penelope Edmonds, “Unpacking Settler Colonialism’s Urban Strategies: Indigenous Peoples in
Victoria, British Columbia, and the Transition to a Settler-Colonial City,” Urban History Review / Revue d’histoire
urbaine 38 no. 2 (2010), 4-20.

Mo’e’hahne 117
denigrated spaces and bodies are formed through the interconnected processes of seizing and
“repurposing” Indigenous lands, anti-Indigenous violence, as well as patterns of white and non-
white migration to the settler city. These migrations, as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini have
observed, in turn, fuel the creation of new settler economies and the re/production of new settler
societies. Rather than being temporally tied to initial moments of settler-Indigenous encounter,
the spatial and corporeal violence of these colonizing urban social forms work across time and
space in urban settler worlds. These violences are, thus, continually reproduced through forms of
racial, gendered, and sexual difference alongside the concomitant relations Indigenous
abjection.
76

Transit and “Multi-Cultural” Settlement at El Pueblo Park
The planners emphasized circuits colonial tourism and transit, for instance, by noting El
Pueblo Park’s proximity to Union Station.
77
With this focus on tourism and mobility, they
offered a narration of El Pueblo history that was oriented towards forms of settler-colonial

76. Given the history of overlapping forms of occupation and violence in the spaces of downtown, it is not
surprising that the city’s redevelopment plans cartographically represented and emphasized the spatial proximity of
El Pueblo State Park to other potential remade tourist spaces of Bunker Hill, the Civic Center district, the ethnic
arcades of Chinatown and Little Tokyo, as well as Dodger’s Stadium (with its own story of residentially displacing a
migrant Mexican community that had starting living on occupied Gabrielino-Tongva lands in the nineteen thirties
and was relocated in the nineteen fifties). For instance, see Thomas Hines, “Housing, Baseball, and Creeping
Socialism: The Battle of Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles, 1949-1959, Journal of Urban History, 8 no. 2 (1982):123-
143. Additionally, by the nineteen seventies, Civic Center had become the site of numerous local and federal
colonial juridical and administrative structures, mere blocks from City Hall and Yaanga. Planners also gestured to
the “obsolescent” structures, and by extension the communities surrounding El Pueblo in Bunker Hill that they
claimed prevented the park from becoming larger tourist destination. “Comprehensive Development Plan,” 19.

77. Planners metaphorically and materially and constructed the station as port of entry for the visiting
masses to the historic center of Los Angeles. The station was represented as an engine of biopolitics that, through
transportation, would fed the expanding Los Angeles colony by producing and channeling non-Indigenous tourist
subjects into El Pueblo, a spatial and symbolic metonym for the greater settler metropolis. At El Pueblo, they would
corporeally interact with and refill the colonizing spaces of La Plaza.

Mo’e’hahne 118
tourism and possession: “Well before the coming of the Spanish in 1769, the state’s first tourists
arrived: American Indians who migrated to the area in considerable numbers, probably for the
same reasons that motivate people today: excellent location, natural abundance, pleasant climate,
ect.”
78
Indigenous people, lacking cultural specificity, are figured as California’s first “tourists”
who simply happened upon the lands of “natural abundance.” The transient Indian is incapable
of possessing connections to space or place beyond those of a traveler that decides to stay at a
tourist destination they have visited. This figuration naturalizes an imagined Indigenous
nomadism and challenges Gabrielino-Tongva Indigeneity, who are also absent from the
narration. In language that might be used to document the lives of non-human animals,
Indigenous people are described as “migrating in considerable numbers,” while simultaneously
being figured as the first real-estate speculators who are drawn to the region’s “pleasant climate”
and “excellent location.”
79

Turning to the tourists they aim to attract with the park redevelopment, the planners also
noted that out-of-state visitors represented a potential market. However, their primary consuming
audience would be local residents, with Mexican/American ethnic associations identified as
important potential visitors. They called for increased representations of Los Angeles’s “ethnic”
and “cultural” heritage at the park, specifically, the contributions of “American Indian, Spanish,
Mexicans, English, French, Japanese, Chinese, and Afro-Americans,” much like the city’s

78. City of Los Angeles, “El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park Comprehensive Development
Plan,” 8.

79. Ibid., The planners further narrate Los Angeles through tropes of transit and race: “After the Spanish
came in 1769 to create the first settlement in California…other ethnic groups made their way to the west coast, and
the opening of the West in the mid-1800’s initiated the influx of people from all corners of the world that has made
Los Angeles a true cosmopolis.” Multiracial settlement was propelled en mass by “the opening of the West,” a
violent transcontinental path of transit that was forged through the destruction of many Indigenous lives and social
worlds whose western movement was made possible by railway technologies. In this way, themes of settler-colonial
transit is cathected Los Angeles’s Union Station.

Mo’e’hahne 119
twenty-first century narration. “In recognition of the cultural and historic debt due [to] many
ethnic groups in the growth of Los Angeles,” the planners proposed building a “Multi-cultural
Village” at the park. They thus sought to extend Christine Sterling’s nineteen-thirties vision of a
Mexican/American themed tourist destitution to include other racial and ethnic groups. The
Multi-cultural Village would consist of “a series of cultural heritage complexes,” spaces, where
colonial village life could be recreated, and shopping centers.
80

The planners wrote that not everyone in Los Angeles had access to the “good life.”
Presumably the city and county colonial administrators were indirectly referencing the regimes
of urban settler necropolitics, racialized state violence, and civil unrest of the nineteen-sixties
(such as the violence exacted on black bodies, the civil unrest in Watts in 1965, and the myriad
state violences against Mexican/Americans in East Los Angeles in recent decades that had
received public attention). According to the colonial planners, building the Multi-cultural Village
and incorporating the “[e]thnic theme areas such as Chinatown, Olvera Street, [and] Little
Tokyo” into the project was “an ideal way” to “underscore” the city’s “common heritage and the
significant contribution of various ethnic groups.” The multicultural and multiracial oriented
commemorative, settler spaces of the park would, therefore, “[e]ncourage cooperation among
groups of varying cultural backgrounds…[while] encourag[ing] the creative use of leisure time
through education and greater civic involvement.”
81
The Multi-cultural Village would help to
symbolically quell the civil unrest that was gripping the colony and had arose in response to
racialized subjection by further connecting the multiracial settler socialities to the mythic heart of
the colony and its commemorative regimes of Gabrielino-Tongva replacement: El Pueblo Park.

80. Ibid.

81. City of Los Angeles, “El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park Comprehensive Development
Plan,” 7, 25.
Mo’e’hahne 120
When read alongside the large-scale redevelopment plans of the late nineteen sixties, the
narratives of colonial settlement offered by the settler state reveal that colonial administrators
sought to materially and symbolically strengthen non-white colonial attachments to occupied
Yaanga. Mirroring the twenty-first-century narrations that I read at the beginning of the chapter,
the park redevelopments aimed to forge additional affective and cultural bonds to the Indigenous
homelands through settler-common-sense narrations of an inclusive and racially diverse colonial
past, present, and future. Recreating (imagined) forms of early multiracial Los Angeles settler
colonialism through the Multi-cultural Village in order to mitigate the spatial and corporeal
colonial hierarchies further naturalizes the regimes of Indigenous abjection, slaving, and
replacement that are foundational to the settler metropolis’s colonial order. In other words,
further material, spatial, and symbolic incorporation into the Los Angeles colony are
simultaneously presented as remedies to and celebrations of racialized difference without
addressing the foundational and ongoing colonization of Indigenous lives and lands. Such
formulations represent praxes of indigenization: symbolically and materially connecting non-
Indigenous populations and the related categories of identification and bios (in this case, racial
and ethnic identities) to a particular space and place in ways that represent the non-indigenous as
the natural, storied, and rightful inhabitants and possessors of the land, while Indigenous people
are figured as transient, abjectable, and absent subjects or willful colonial participants.

La Plaza de Cultura y Artes and Twenty-first Century Settlerism
The massive redevelopments sought by the planners of the nineteen seventies (that would
have remade the entire section of downtown Los Angeles surrounding El Pueblo Park) did not
Mo’e’hahne 121
occur. However, in the following decades, many of the changes the colonial administrators
envisioned slowly unfolded through an array of government and commercial projects. The
historic structures at El Pueblo were restored, new shopping spaces and restaurants were added,
and the visibility of Mexican/American culture was increased throughout the tourist spaces of
Olvera Street and El Pueblo Park (fortifying both Sterling’s vision as well as the planners of the
nineteen seventies visions). Importantly, by the late nineteen eighties and the early nineteen
nineties, the spaces of Bunker Hill, Civic Center, and Union Station would become significant
sites where the earth would be reopened and further burrowed into by the settler metropolis in
order to produce Los Angeles’s subway system. This remaking of Indigenous land would,
therefore, extend the paths of Union Station imagined by the planners of the nineteen seventies
deeper into the settler-colonial city by creating subterranean channels for settler subjects to
traverse the occupied lands and rehearse the transit of settlement through daily commutes and
tourism. Additionally, the transportation infrastructure of Union Station was expanded, through
the construction of a subway system, thus allowing it to further feed El Pueblo park.
82
The Multi-
cultural Village complex, however, was not built. Nevertheless in 2004, the first steps towards
creating a new Mexican/American oriented commemorative space at the park were taken when
the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved the development of La Plaza de Cultura
y Artes. Reworking the sign “La Plaza,” that had been mapped onto the Indigenous spaces by
Spanish colonialism, the center was intended to be a “Mexican American cultural and

82. Since the late nineteen nineties, redevelopment and gentrification had begun to remake the spaces of
Little Tokyo and Chinatown in relation to circuits of settler capital and transportation development. For instance, in
the mid 2000s, a light rail line was built that connected Chinatown, Union Station, and Little Tokyo in order to
channel commuting publics from the suburban spaces of Pasadena and labor from the low-income urban spaces of
East Los Angeles into and through the site of Los Angeles’ mythic settlement. See Ethan N. Elkind, Railtown: The
Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

Mo’e’hahne 122
multimedia center dedicated to broadening the public’s appreciation of the diverse contributions
of early Mexican American settlers to the history of Los Angeles [emphasis added].”
83
La Plaza
de Cultura y Artes planners identified Mexican/Americans as the early settlers of Los Angeles
and sought memorialize their colonial practices. The development plans included the
construction of a museum, a performing arts center, outdoor classrooms, and a memorial garden
in addition to restoring and repurposing key historic buildings in the park. The project was
planned and funded by the La Plaza non-profit organization. Funding also included corporate and
individual donations as well as public grants. The project was politically spearheaded by Gloria
Molina, a prominent, local Mexican/American politician. At the time, Molina served as a
member of the County Board of Supervisors, one of the most powerful bodies in Los Angeles
County colonial governance. Molina was also a member of La Plaza non-profit board of
directors, a conflict of interest that was publicly noted in all of the planning materials. Enacting
the previous colonial planner’s vision to further connect the park to surrounding commercial
spaces, La Plaza de Cultural y Artes planers called for the construction of “various paseos and
pedestrian walkways to adjacent properties” that would connect the new commemorative spaces
to what was being remapped as “El Pueblo Historic District.” The first phase of the project
included building restorations and moderate construction. The second phase, which began in
2010, required the reworking of existing park spaces and structures as well as digging deeper
into the earth to produce the new structures. With the breaking of ground, twenty-first-century
Mexican/American politicians and community activists, in a sense, began building the first of the

83. September 28, 2010 “Plaza De Cultural Y Artes Project Approve the Addendum to the Final
Environmental Impact Report and Approve the Refinements to the Approved Project (First District) (3 Votes),”
County of Los Angeles Chief Executive Office; “Addendum to the Environmental Impact Report for LA PLAZA
DE CULTURAL Y ARTES” (SCH No. 20011011167) Prepared for Mr. Daniel Mendoza, La Plaza De Cultura Y
Artes Foundation; prepared by Sapphos Environmental, Inc., September 14, 2010.
Mo’e’hahne 123
Multi-cultural Villages that the settler state had called for in the early nineteen-seventies to
mitigate racial violence and discord.

Identifying the Indigenous Body at La Plaza de Cultural y Artes
In late October 2010, at least fourteen bodies were exhumed during La Plaza
construction. The bodies were exhumed in area of the park that La Plaza planners had identified
as the former site of a cemetery associated with La Placita (the first colonial church). Once the
bodies were found, La Plaza developers told local media that construction was halted. The Los
Angeles County Coroner’s Office was called in to investigate. La Plaza developers also invited
several archeologists to study the site and assist with the exhumation. Coffins, complete
skeletons, and burial items were unearthed. The bodily remains were placed in buckets and
plastic trash bags throughout the construction site. Before construction, La Plaza developers
concluded “that all human remains previously on site were relocated more than 100 years ago.”
However, the environmental impact report that they submitted to the county did not stipulate
when the first person was buried in the cemetery or when exactly the bodies were relocated. The
Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles also confirmed the removal of the burials during the
planning process, yet a specific timeline was omitted.
84

Not long after human remains were discovered, Gabrielino-Tongva tribal members and
activists from the local Native community came forward. They asked La Plaza developers to stop
all construction and allow tribal members to access the site so that tribal members and tribal
archeologists could handle the remains and see to their proper reburial. Gabrielino-Tongva

84. LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes Addendum EIR Memorandum for the Record, Archaeological Resources
and Human Remains Impacts Assessment, September 30, 2008, Sapphos Environmental, Inc., 3.5-18, 3.5-17.

Mo’e’hahne 124
community members and local Indigenous community activist insisted that La Plaza abide by the
1990 federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and return the
remains to the tribe.
85
For the Gabrielino-Tongva and other tribes in the region, it was common
knowledge that their relatives were buried in the cemeteries at El Pueblo. The burials at El
Pueblo range from the eighteen twenties to the eighteen forties. Approximately seven hundred
people were the buried in La Placita cemetery, including Spanish and Mexican settlers in
addition the Gabrielino-Tongva and the many Indigenous Kumeyaay/Diegueño,
Acjachemen/Juaneño, Luiseño, and Cahuilla and other Indigenous migrants that were channeled
into the colony by the repressive settler labor regimes. Many of the Gabrielino-Tongva interned
in the cemetery were likely villagers from Yaanga or the surrounding areas.
Once the bodies were exhumed, La Plaza spokespersons, the LA County Coroner’s
Office, and the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese declared that, contrary to the Indigenous
knowledges about the cemetery, the remains where those of Christians and not Indians. Through
this formulation, the Mexican/American non-profit and political institution, the settler state, and
the Archdiocese concluded that Indigenous people could not simultaneously be Christian and
Indigenous. Affirming the violent Christianizing logics that the Spanish crown and the
Franciscans deployed to engulf the Indigenous lives of Yaanga centuries earlier, the twenty-first-
century multiracial settler colonists maintained that Christian conversion undid Indigeneity. Such
an understanding of colonial history and Indigenous experiences ignores that fact that many of
Indigenous people who lived and died in El Pueblo colony—beginning with the children
abducted by governor de Neve in 1781—had been forcibly converted to Christianity, either at

85. NAGPRA includes regulations for the protection of Indigenous remains and objects and mandates their
return tribes. The regulations, however, only apply to public institutions that receive federal funding, such as
museums and universities, which often exists as organs of the settler state itself. See Kathleen S Fine-Dare, Grave
Injustice: the American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
Mo’e’hahne 125
Mission San Gabriel or by the regimes of colonial violence that cut into Yaanga and transformed
it into El Pueblo colony. For instance, according to Governor de Neve, one of the purposes of the
settler colonies was to “hasten the conversion…of the countless pagans.” Whereas, Commandant
General de Croix held that the Los Angeles settler colonists’ primary duty was “to attract
Indian’s joyfully by the practice of true justice and good example of the knowledge of our Sacred
Religion.”
86
Given these relations of Christianizing violence and the instrumentalization of
“true [disciplinary] justice” on the Indigenous bodies in pain at Yaanga, it is likely that, whatever
their faith, the Indigenous people who died in colony would have been buried according to
Christian practices, especially in a cemetery operated by a Catholic church. La Plaza de Cultura
y Artes spokespeople, the Archdiocese, and the settler state thus wielded this Indigenous
figuration in order to silence Gabrielino-Tongva voices and evade settler state policy, namely
NAGPRA.
The story was soon picked up by the local news media. For instance, KCAL 9 (the local
CBS affiliate) aired a two-minute story covering the events. The segment consisted of brief,
edited interviews with two Gabrielino-Tongva tribal members. The tribal members were
positioned in front of a chain-link fence that separated them, the camera, and the viewer from
construction site on the other side of the barrier. The segment was filmed at night with the lights
of the city glowing in the background. Andrew Salas, a tribal member wearing a white hardhat
that read “Tongva and L.A. Basin,” addressed the camera. Salas held papers in one hand,
presumably from LA County and LA Plaza developers, as he gestured towards the fence behind
him: “We are on the outside, we are outside looking in, [on] our own Native lands that we cannot
protect,” he said to the interviewer, who stood off camera. “But what about our culture” he asks,

86. Ibid.

Mo’e’hahne 126
before the segment abruptly cuts to another moment with an elderly man, Ernie Salas, identified
as a “Gabrielino Tribe Chief.” Ernie Salas also stands in front of the fence. “And now we are
known as refugees in our own land,” he says, before the scene is quickly edited and returns to
footage of a white male reporter standing in front of the fence narrating the events which is
paired with day-time footage of the construction site and excavations.
87
Even through the theatre
of local broadcast news (the Gabrielino-Tongva figures positioned against the fence and the
quickly edited segments) the newscast importantly represents of Gabrielino-Tongva struggles
with the setter-state and non-native spatial praxes to non-indigenous viewing publics. Indigenous
people as physically and symbolically excluded and barred from their homelands which “they
cannot protect.” The Gabrielino-Tongva are separated from their homelands and their buried
ancestors by the many colonizing fences that cut across Yaanga; the fence captured in the news
segment is illustrative and symbolic of the settler-colonizing cartographies and “spatial
apartheid” that comprise the Los Angeles colonial cosmopole. Indigenous people are relegated to
the status of “refugees,” as Salas observers, without a reservation or commemorative space, in
their “own” fragmented homelands, while practices of Indigenous abjection and replacement are
naturalized in the colonial cultures of Los Angeles.
Another Gabrielino-Tongva member, Bernie Acuna, gave an interview to a local NPR
station, “They were taking bones out with buckets and bags,” he said. “It’s very disrespectful and
a desecration of our ancestors…We were the original Los Angelinos. We were here before
anyone was.”
88
Acuna emphasized the dehumanizing ways in which their relatives were treated,

87. “Unearthing History,” KCAL 9 Los Angeles, October 2010.

88. Mandalit Del Barco, “New Cultural Center Celebrates L.A.’s Mexican Roots,” Morning Edition,
National Public Radio, May 5, 2011, accessed March 10, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2011/05/05/135985233/new-
cultural-center-celebrates-l-a-s-mexican-roots.
Mo’e’hahne 127
placing their bones in buckets and bags, transforming them into objects. By identifying the
Gabrielino-Tongva are first “Los Angelinos,” Acuna countered settler claims to the land and
implied that both living and deceased Indigenous people deserved to be treated with respect in
their own homelands. The circulation of the story in local media was an important moment in
local, public colonial discourse where Gabrielino-Tongva subjects were permitted to speak to the
settler-colonial culture and occupying communities regarding their dispossession through the
violent prism of the unearthing of their relatives.
It was finally revealed that, in fact, 118 sets of human remains were exhumed at the site.
After being removed from the cemetery, the bodies were held by the LA County Coroner’s
Office and then transported to the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum for storage,
which is located across the street from the University of Southern California. The unidentified
Indigenous bodies were transformed into artifacts of the region’s “natural history.” The
objectified bodies remained locked away in a storage room for at the museum for nearly a year.
In response to the events, Gabrielino-Tongva community members released a public statement
on KPFK, a local public radio station. The statement was also distributed among the Los Angeles
area Native community and activist networks via email. The Gabrielino-Tongva community
declared that:
Once human remains were encountered, possible descendants should have contacted in
order create a plan for appropriate removal and reburial...The Los Angeles Archdiocese
has a list of those that were interred at the cemetery...the possibility that Native American
remains are being removed without participation of the Gabrielino (Tongva) Nation is
illegal under California law.

As the most likely descendants of the exhumed burials, as soon as bodies were discovered the
Gabrielino-Tongva should have been contacted by both the settler state (LA County) and La
Plaza developers.
Mo’e’hahne 128
The Gabrielino-Tongva eventually notified the California State Native American
Heritage Commission. The Heritage Commission is a body within the settler state that is tasked
with overseeing the identification and protection of Native remains, for instance, by working
through federal NAGPRA guidelines to identify the “most likely descendants” of corporeal
remains and cultural objects. The Heritage Commission also oversees government records
regarding Indigenous lineage (such as the California state Indian Claims and Judgement rolls).
89

The Heritage Commission is comprised members of federally recognized tribes but it still
handles issues related to tribes without federal recognition, like the Gabrielino-Tongva. The
Heritage Commission concluded that according to the federal and California state Native
American Graves Protection and Reparation Act (NAGRA) laws (which mandates return of
Indigenous bodies and cultural objects of Native death) La Plaza developers should have
contacted the Heritage Commission as soon as the remains were found, so that the most likely
descendants could be identified and contacted for repatriation. Based on research conducted with
the Huntington Library’s early California population resources, archaeologist and Gabrielino-
Tongva tribal member Desiree Martinez testified to the commission that 388 of the 696 recorded
burials at the site were identified as Native American in church archives. As an Indigenous
archaeologist, Martinez expressed serious concerns about the ways that the local government and
the developers were handling the human remains. Non-native archeologist Paul Langenwalter
also testified before the Heritage Commission. Langenwalter had been invited to the site by the
developers once the bodies were discovered. However, once Langenwalter witnessed the
excavation methods and the multiple failures to comply with federal and state law, he resigned
from the project. According to Langenwalter, the excavations moved diagonally across graves

89. Jurmain and McCawley, O’ My Ancestor, 179, 195-200.
Mo’e’hahne 129
separating skulls, limbs, and torsos. Native bodies were, therefore, simply dismembered by the
crews working at the site without any regard for their corporeal value or integrity. Langenwalter
testified that two of the fourteen burial sites he observed were, in fact, buried according to
Indigenous burial practices, as the bodies were placed in the fetal position rather than lying on
their back in accordance with Catholic practices.
90
Based on the evidence presented to the
Heritage Commission, more than half of burials at the site were those of Indigenous peoples and
at least two were buried according to Indigenous practices. At least half of 118 bodies exhumed
were, therefore, likely Gabrielino-Tongva villagers and Indigenous migrants who were
conscripted into laboring in the colony, while the rest of the bodies where multiracial colonists.
The public statement circulated by the Gabrielino-Tongva also highlighted the “irony” of the
excavations and desecrations being carried out while producing a celebratory Mexican/American
space:
This museum is supposed to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments and
contributions of the Mexican and Mexican-American communities to the development of
Los Angeles. However, the fact that these early settler burials, the very people the
Museum is supposed to be honoring, are being removed in secret is ironic.
91

For La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, it seems honoring the colonists of the past is best carried out by
erecting new structures to affirm the presence of their descendants and secure their futurity
within the colonial order; yet Mexican settling subjects were being objectified and abjected just
like Indigenous people, perhaps through their proximity to Indigenous death. Despite the
testimonies and the evidence presented, the Heritage Commission was unable to take control of

90. Langenwalter also witnessed a body that was found with beads around its neck being removed from a
grave without photographs being taken. Hector Tobar, “An apology Comes Too Late: Mishandling of Buried
Remains Mars Molina’s Dream Museum” Los Angeles times, April 01, 2011,
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/01/local/la-me-tobar-20110401; California Native American Heritage
Commission Meeting Minutes, Ronald Reagan State Building, Los Angeles, CA. March 28, 2011, accessed
February 15, 2013, http://www.nahc.ca.gov/Minutes%23_28.pdf

91. Gabrielino-Tongva, “Statement of Facts & Call to Action.”
Mo’e’hahne 130
the site. They were also unable to force the LA County Coroner’s Office to comply with
NAGRPA guidelines and return the remains to the most likely descendants because the
Gabrielino-Tongva are not legally recognized as “tribe” by the US settler state. Furthermore, Los
Angeles County does not recognize any forms of Indigenous sovereignty within its boundaries.

Enacting Settler Colonialism through Colonial Affect and Indigenous Abjection
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Gloria Molina, the prominent
Mexican/American politician that spearheaded La Plaza project, called the project a “true labor
of love.” However, in the face of the overwhelming evidence of the Indigenous burials and the
desiccation of human remains, Molina choose to perform another form of affective labor. A few
days before the museum was scheduled to open, Molina met with the Heritage Commission in
the Ronald Reagan State building in downtown Los Angeles. The meeting was thus convened in
an organ of the settler state that was named for the colonial administrator that, thirty years prior,
had paved the way for Molina’s Mexican/American “Multi-cultural Village”: La Plaza de
Cultura y Artes. After listening an hour of testimonies from the Heritage Commissioners and
Gabrielino-Tongva community members, Molina apologized for the way the project had been
handled. Molina told the Los Angeles Times, “It’s a huge mistake…What else can you do when
you make a big mistake but apologize? Some will accept it, others won’t...But it wasn’t done by
intent or by design.”
92
Molina’s apology, however, did not grant the Heritage Commission or the
Gabrielino-Tongva access to their relatives or halt the construction. Rather, Molina sought to
diminish La Plaza’s culpability while minimizing the violence visited on Indigenous people by
declaring the acts of removal and dismemberment a mistake. For Molina, the practices of

92. Tobar, “An apology Comes Too Late.”

Mo’e’hahne 131
Indigenous dismemberment, removal, and abjection were not intentional or done by designed,
nor where they the results of deep, trans-temporal structures of settler colonialism that rest on the
continued denigration and replacement of Indigenous people in the colonized the spaces of
Yaanga. Through what Sarah Ahmed calls an “affective economy,”
93
Mexican/American
racialized grievances with the settler state and the hierarchies of space and bodies that take shape
within and through urban settler colonialism are transformed into Molina’s “true labor of love”:
carving further into the Gabrielino-Tongva earth to create La Plaza de Cultura y Artes. For
Mexican/American subjects enmeshed in this affective economy of settler colonialism, violence
against Indigenous people is, as Jodi Byrd observes, “lamentable but not grievable.”
94
Molina
thus works ameliorate the colonial affects of Mexican/American racialized suffering through
spatially commemorating Mexican/American colonial settlers. These indigenizing
Mexican/American spatial praxes and the structures of feeling the produce rest on taking further
possession of the already occupied Gabrielino-Tongva homelands through creating La Plaza de
Cultura y Artes. Molina’s “labor of love,” in turn, produces further pain for the Gabrielino-
Tongva who are made to endure sensations of dislocation from their homelands as they are
forced to watch their relatives being transformed into objects, torn from limb to limb, placed in
buckets and bags, and carried away as artifacts of natural history. These forms of corporeal
abjection, therefore, reproduce historic Spanish and Mexican colonial practices of objectifying

93. Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2015 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 44-45.

94. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 38.

Mo’e’hahne 132
and denigrating Indigenous bodies as less than human and as those who are excluded from the
settler-colonizing bios.
95

Following Molina’s apology and despite the Gabrielino-Tongva and Heritage
Commission’s protests, on April 15, 2011, La Plaza held a grand opening gala next to the
cemetery. While the 118 bodies sat in storage at the Natural History Museum,
Mexican/American celebrities such as Eva Longoria and Edward James Olmos and prominent
Los Angeles politicians including Antonio Villaraigosa attended the gala. La Plaza’s decision to
proceed with the gala demonstrates that praxes of carving out additional Mexican/American
commemorative spatial possessions, at the expense living and dead Indigenous people, is an
event worth celebrating.
La Plaza de Cultural y Artes opened to the public in May 2011. Over the next year, the
second phase of construction was completed and a memorial garden for “early Los Angeles
settlers” was created on the site of the exhumed burials. The 118 human remains were reburied
in secret somewhere on the site—presumably in the “memorial garden.” Tribal members were
not given the opportunity to visit their relatives while they were in storage at the Natural History
Museum, nor were they allowed to attend or perform the reburials. Remains were not returned to
any tribe, even though a portion of the exhumed bodies were likely those of migrants from
federally recognized tribes in Southern California, whose “rights” are legally recognized and
protected by NAGPRA. The memorial garden for early settlers was included in the original plans

95. These processes can be compared to what Nayan Shah calls “estrangement,” which Shah defines “the
active process of forcible dislocation” that produces increased vulnerability for some populations and enhances other
populations. However, the relations and experiences of Indigenous estrangement for Indigenous homelands take
shape through different settler-colonial regimes of violences, as compared to the lives of racialized migrants who
seek to “settle” in the occupied Indigenous homelands that Shah reads. See Nayan Shah. Stranger Intimacy:
Contesting Race, Sexuality, and Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011),
262.
Mo’e’hahne 133
approved by the county, but it was intended for a different location. When the remains were
discovered, developers relocated and repurposed the garden to accommodate the reburials.
The memorial garden sits adjacent to La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, along an unpaved
footpath that channels visitors from the street to the museum. The garden is filled with plants and
surrounded by fences that prevent visitors from accessing the suppose spaces of reburial. Several
commemorative signs line the garden, which commemorate the founding of the colony and the
multiethnic and multiracial colonists. One sign recognizes the existence of Yaanga and figures
the Gabrielino-Tongva as the first “settlers” of the region. The Pueblo colony, however, is
simply narrated as growing into Los Angeles and settler necropolitics are effaced. The signs also
narrate the historic burials and the discovery of the human remains. For instance, one reads: “We
remember and honor those who came before us.” The sign informs visitor that the first
“recorded” burial in church records was that of José Maria of “Diegueño (Kumeyaay) origin” on
January 6, 1823. The “last known burial” is that of Juan Bautista “of Sierra (possibly Serrano)
origin,” on November 8, 1844. During construction in 2010, another plaque reads, “human
remains were discovered” and “[a]t the request of the public, work was halted and the County of
Los Angeles engaged in an extensive process to reinter all remains following the laws and
regulations of both federal and state agencies and archeological best practices.” The sign then
repeats: “[w]e remember and honor those who came before us.” The disciplinary texts of state
fashioned public memory record Indigenous life and death as routinized events that mark the
passing of time and the cultural after/life of the cemetery. The violence of settler colonialism is
effaced as are the conditions of duress and the necro-economies of Indigenous labor that would
have brought Kumeyaay people, whose homeland’s lie over a hundred miles away, and (the
liminally) Serrano people, whose homelands lie approximately eighty miles away, to Yaanga.
Mo’e’hahne 134
The final public story also eclipses the material and affective realities that Gabrielino-Tongva
tribal members and the California State Indian Heritage Commission experienced and
documented. The settler state and La Plaza developers’ culpability is denied through the
legalistic rendering of the episode (“following the laws and regulations of both federal and state
agencies and archeological best practices”). Yet the two Indigenous figures named in the signs,
in fact, hail from federally recognized tribes whose remains should have been repatriated to the
tribes according to state and federal law. The spatial and textual garden forms represent what
Macarena Gómez-Barris theorizes as “memory symbolics” that have been employed by the
settler state and La Plaza de Cultura y Artes—which essentially functions in concert with the
state.
96
According to Gómez-Barris, memory symbolics can encompass the state-mediated
“forms of memory that capture, disentangle, subdue, refuse, [and] dilute” stories of violence and
its aftermath by selectively condensing “particular meaning formations, while banishing others
from public visibility.”
97
Memory symbolics can be “mobilized to selectively manage history in
ways that reproduce state hegemony,” for instance, by “reinscribing national identity.”
98
In the
case of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, the memory symbolics banish anti-Indigenous violence from
public memory and reinscribe settler narratives of settler colonization and belonging by
transiting the “honored” but deceased Indian, who is paradoxically disappeared in plain site (as a
supposedly reburied corpse). Furthermore, as Gómez-Barris illustrates of the public, institutional
practices of memorializing Chilean state violence,
99
transforming El Pueblo Park into sites of

96. Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009), 5.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid.

99. Gómez-Barris, specifically, reads the Villa Grimaldi torture center and Peace Park. Ibid., 37-73.

Mo’e’hahne 135
“leisure” and “escape” from the city—through the gardens, walking paths, and La Plaza de
Cultura y Artes museum itself—further obscures the past, present, and future violences that have
willed and continue to will settler-colonial occupation into being. Hidden among the plants, the
remains of the laboring Indigenous people that died in Yaanga are transformed into the
decorative gardens that mark the contours of the indigenizing Mexican/American
commemorative spatial present. The signs literally transform the Indigenous into what Jodi Byrd
calls the “signposts and grave markers of empire.”
100
The Indigenous becomes a decorative past-
tense figure in the spaces of continual violence.

Colonial-Racial Affect and the Sliding Grammars of Indigeneity
The violent machinations of race created by the settler colonialism produce colonial-
racial affects: the affective states that racialized subjects are made to experience in settler
society. Non-native subjects that live in a settler colony can simultaneously experience
radicalized life chances while continuing to engage in practices of settler colonization. Such
complex hierarchical social formations are not paradoxical. Instead, these formations are
representative of the kinds of contradictions that are produced as settler-colonial necropower
sorts the colonizing bios along axes of subjection and enfranchisement. Settler necropower
operates through a calculous where the Native is always positioned as abjectable and replaceable,
while Indigenous homelands are always read as the potential possession of non-natives. The
feelings produced by racial othering and racial suffering however can, in turn, animate racialized
subjects’ political responses to the racial hierarchies of settler colonialism, such as the “true
labors of love” that willed the La Plaza de Cultura y Artes into being. Examining the stories that

100. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 6.
Mo’e’hahne 136
La Plaza de Cultura y Artes commemorates reveals the political imaginaries that can take shape
and the webs of colonial common sense that persist both through and despite the violence of
racial subjection that Mexican/American socialites living in occupied Yaanga endure. Settling
Mexican/American socialites transtemporally connect these colonial-racial affects to the spaces
of El Pueblo Park/El Pueblo de Los Angeles colony. In the words of NPR correspondent
Mandalit del Barco, “La Plaza [de Cultural y Artes] pays tribute to the complex histories and
identities of Mexicanos, Californios [Mexican origin subjects living in California], Mexican-
Americans and Chicanos… [emphasis added].” According to del Barco, “everyone from
musicians in the group Ozomatli to the 44 settlers who arrived from Mexico in 1781 to establish
the city of Los Angeles” are honored at the museum.
101
In interview conducted not long after the
center’s opening, Miguel Angel Corzo, La Plaza de Cultura y Artes president and CEO, told del
Barco, “[t]here is a tremendous tradition in our culture of storytelling.” For Corzo, the center’s
mission is to collect and commemorate the “folklore” of those who partook in the colonization of
Los Angeles and all of the generations that followed.
102
In addition to the mythic narrative of
colonial settlement, La Plaza de Cultura y Artes tell stories of Mexican/American racial suffering
and racial politics, such as the deportation of Mexican/Americans during the Great Depression
and Mexican/American political activism of the nineteen sixties and seventies. One of the
exhibits, for instance, is on the peaceful Vietnam War protests known as the “Chicano
Moratorium” where Mexican/American reporter Ruben Salazar was shot and killed by LA
County Sheriff’s deputies. The protests where part of the waves of youth-oriented,
Mexican/American political activism in Los Angeles that, in part, grew out of student protests of

101. del Barco, “New Cultural Center Celebrates L.A.’s Mexican Roots.”

102. Ibid.
Mo’e’hahne 137
the substandard and racist public schools during the nineteen sixties. Some of the activism of the
era was cathected to emergent Chicano identifications. The activism and its subsequent
commemoration in La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, therefore, bear traces of the necropolitical and
spatial imaginaries created by some formulations of Chicano politics.
The leftist writings of Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Los Angeles-based and self-identified
Chicano activist, are representative of the colonial folklore, modes of redress, and Indigenous
figuration that Chicano political imaginaries can produce when mapped onto the spaces of El
Pueblo Colony/Park. Acosta’s 1973 semi-autobiographical novel, The Revolt of the Cockroach
People, narrates episodes of colonial state violence against Mexican/Americans in Los Angeles
and the community’s responses to the nominally white colonial hegemonies. Acosta’s novel was
published three years after the Los Angeles colonial administrators presented their plans to
redevelop El Pueblo Park through increasing the representations of non-white and non-native
socialities. The state violence and community responses that Acosta narrates represent the civil
unrest of the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies that the Los Angeles city planners
where working to quell by creating the Multi-cultural Village. For example, Acosta describes a
march of five thousand people who had come out to support the East LA Thirteen, a group of
Mexican/American high school that students that were arrested and charged with staging a
school walkout. The march makes its way through occupied Yaanga, only to arrive at La Plaza in
El Pueblo Park: “We are on the streets now and walking toward the small square, a designated
historical monument...And yes, the place is historical,” Acosta writes, it is “the original site of
old LA, when the Mexicans and Californios were in power” [emphasis added].
103
Rather than
acknowledging the settler-colonial iconography of the plaza as a testament to the enduring

103. Acosta, The Revenge of the Cockroach People, 58.

Mo’e’hahne 138
colonization of Gabrielino-Tongva lives and lands through Spanish, Mexican, and US
occupation, Acosta reads the space as a lamentable testament to a time when Mexicans and
Californios dominated the stolen Indigenous lands. In order to spatially articulate Chicano
racialized affect and politics, the crowd must return to the La Plaza, the site of Los Angeles’s
mythic colonial birth. Acosta’s formulation of a homecoming, through (symbolically and
materially) returning Chicanos their proper place in the colonial order is mirrored by the settler-
state’s proposed mid-twentieth-century Mexican/American Multi-cultural Village and Gloria
Molina and La Plaza de Cultural y Artes developers’ twenty-first-century settler spatial praxis.
Standing in the La Plaza, Acosta delivers a speech to the gathered masses where he
frames the redress of Chicano grievances with US settler hegemony through increased
representation in the settler-colonial pedagogical institutions. “The East LA Thirteen are behind
bars,” he tells the crowd, “because they rose to speak out against the educational system in this
country…we want the books, the teachers and the materials to reflect our own culture?”
104
In
order to frame Mexican/American grievances, Acosta invokes the colonial legal inscriptions and
cartographies produced by the US and Mexican colonizing nation states while working to divide
up occupied Native lands: “Are we such a threat just because we have demanded a compliance
with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which provided for a bilingual society?…Viva La
Raza…Long live the East LA Thirteen, Power to the people, and Chicano Power.”
105
In the
context of US settler colonialism, Jodi Byrd argues that the competing calls for equity and
inclusion within the colonial hegemony, which are premised on Indigenous colonization,

104. Ibid, 61.

105. Ibid.

Mo’e’hahne 139
“creates a cacophony of moral claims that help to deflect progressive and transformative
activism from dismantling the ongoing conditions of colonialism.”
106
The affectively oriented
spatial praxes of Acosta’s text is later fulfilled by La Plaza de Cultural y Artes spatial praxes
through demanding and seizing re/inclusion in to the settler-colonial order. Rather than working
for transformative necropolitical and spatial change and dismantling the material and cultural
forms that continue to colonize Indigenous lives and lands and structure all colonial subject
positions, Acosta’s Chicano settler imaginary and La Plaza’s spatial praxis demand that
Mexican/Americans be granted rightful dominion over the Gabrielino-Tongva homelands.
These colonial-racial affects and the settler folklore they produce work to indigenize non-
native socialities on the occupied Native lands of Los Angeles. Such settler indigenizations,
however, can take on even more insidious forms. For example, later in the novel, Acosta offers a
narrative of the colonial history of the Americas to another gathering of Mexican/Americas.
Acosta connects the colonization of the Caribbean to the beginning of the US occupation of Los
Angeles/Yaanga. The amorphous Indigenous peoples of “Cuba” are figure as extensions of the
“Chicano of Aztlan,” who, according to Acosta, constitute yet another Indigenous people. After
the arrival of the Spanish in the Caribbean Acosta tells the crowd, “[t]hree hundred years later, in
1850 AD, more white men in covered wagons come to…the ancient land of Aztlan [Los
Angeles], the original homeland of the Aztecas…” Later, Acosta declares, “[b]ut we are not
Mexicans…We are Chicanos from Aztlan. We have never left our land. Our fathers never
engaged in bloody sacrifices [here, Acosta disidentifies with the supposed cultural practices of
the Indigenous socialities of Mexico]. We are farmers and hunters and we live with the

106. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xvii.
Mo’e’hahne 140
buffalo.”
107
Acosta thereby transforms the Chicano body into that of the Indigenous people of
Yaanga and beyond.
108
The mythic cartographies of Aztlan—the “homelands” of the Chicano—
are, in fact, mapped onto the occupied homelands of Indigenous peoples through the expanding
northern borders of Spanish empire including Los Angeles (Las Californias, Las Provincias
Internas, Santa Fé de Nuevo Mexico), where Mexican settlers and slavers ventured in search of
extracted wealth and corporeal possessions. Aztlan is also imagined as later encompassing the
boundaries of the Mexican postcolony nation-state. Acosta’s Los Angeles Chicano indigeneity is
simultaneously agrarian—thus claiming a myriad of Indigenous farming cultures—and of the
Great Plains cultures, running with the buffalo thousands of miles away. Erasing in order to
replace the actual Indigenous peoples whose lifeworlds fill the spaces that Acosta claims, he
posits that the Chicano has never left their homelands. The Chicanos from Aztlan are figured as
“indigenous” to Los Angeles and the Las Californias and Santa Fé de Nuevo Mexico provinces
and, therefore, always already home. Rather than acknowledging Chicanos, Mexicans, or
Californios as the original colonizing bios in the region that only later came to be subjected to
white US hegemony, Acosta writes the Chicano as a North American Indian in order to further
indigenize. He abandons the earlier claim to occupied Indigenous homelands through an appeal
to Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo and, instead, claims the same occupied Indigenous lands by
becoming the Indian. Acosta’s Indigenous figuration through becoming Indian is emblematic of

107. Acosta, The Revenge of the Cockroach People, 160-161.

108. Ibid., 68. Throughout the novel, Acosta transmogrifies himself into “Brown Buffalo Zeta.” He
cathects the sign Brown, of Chicano political imaginaries and the Brown Berets (the activist which grew out of the
East Los Angeles school walkouts and helped organize the Chicano Moratorium), to the Indigenous figuration of
animality, the “buffalo,” in order to indigenize in occupied Yaanga. Acosta would inhabit this animal-becoming-
Indian form throughout his oeuvre. My analysis of Acosta is informed by Alex Trimble Young’s readings, see Alex
Trimble Young, “Let us fake out a frontier”: Dissent and the Settler Colonial Imaginary in US Literature after
1945,” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2015).

Mo’e’hahne 141
what B.V. Olguín calls “hegemonic Mestizaje.” Olguín argues that through iterations of a
“hegemonic Mestizaje” Chicana/o nationalist politics and “Xicanindia/o paradigms” lay claim to
the “cultural capital of a model of indigeneity [that is] overdetermined as always already
subaltern.”
109
Reading an archive of “Proto-Chicana/o” and Chicano autobiographical texts that
range from nineteenth century narratives of adopting Indigenous identities, practices of Indian
killing and slaving, to twenty first-century Mexican/American soldiers playing Indian, Olguín
argues that the discursive politics of hegemonic Mestizaje (and the relative silences about
Mexican/American practices of anti-Indigenous violence) are in “complicity with settler
colonialism and genocide.”
110
In the context of Los Angeles settler colonialism,
Mexican/American settlers equally participated in the colonization of Yaanga and benefited from
the necro-economies of Indigenous labor alongside Indigenous settlers of Mexican origin,
African settlers, and Spanish settlers. Chicano and Mexican/American politics that are animated
by colonial-racial affects that always already figure Mexican/Americans as the subaltern ensure
the continuation of the settler-colonial relations of necropower by misremembering the colonial
past and failing to recognize the position of Mexican/American socialities in relation to
Indigenous socialites in the colonial present.

Conclusion
During public hearings convened by the LA Native American Indian Commission in
1986, Rudy Ortega, Sr., a member of the Fernandeño Tataviam (the people who homelands lie in

109. B.V. Olguín, “Caballeros and Indians: Mexican American Whiteness, Hegemonic Mestizaje, and
Ambivalent Indigeneity in Proto Chicana/o Autobiographical Discourse, 1858-2008.” MELUS 38 no. 1 (Spring
2013), 31.

110. Ibid., 31, 45. Olguín also contends that “[w]e must recognize this troubling legacy and also pressure
simplistic cultural nationalist inflections of cultural indigeneity.”
Mo’e’hahne 142
the San Fernando Valley and the San Gabriel Mountains that were incarcerated at Mission San
Fernando), shared a story of how his “ancestors” where torn from their graves during a 1985
construction project in the San Fernando Valley. Similar to La Plaza, the exhumations were
denied for months. Unlike the La Plaza case, the remains were eventually returned to the tribe
and reburied. The items buried with Ortega’s relatives, however, remained captive, “in boxes and
bags,” as part the examining archeologist’s private collection.
111
The Indigenous people of Los
Angeles have been protesting the objectification and denigration of Indigenous burials, bodies,
and artifacts through removing them from their resting places and putting them in plastic
receptacles for at least thirty years. During a 2006 oral history project, Anthony Morales, a
Gabrielino-Tongva tribal leader, reflected on the continual unearthing of this ancestors
throughout Los Angeles region:
All this land is sacred to me because this our territory. Any portion or parcel within our
territory [which] has human remains—that is sacred—artifacts uncovered during
development, when they say, ‘they could be reburied’—to me, spiritually, once you’re
buried, you’re buried. No. Reburials were not meant to be. Once in the ground, that’s it,
or cremated…sacredness is never to be disturbed, never to be desecrated.
112

For Morales, the ancestors should remain where they were interned, regardless of the torrents of
violence that placed them there. Corporeally dislocating, objectifying, and discarding the
Indigenous body in order to re/produce colonial space remain salient colonial praxes throughout
the necropolis of occupied Yaanga. When the Indigenous body is no longer circulated as
commodity, it must be removed from the land in order to make way for the colonizing bios and
its necro-political economies.

111. Simross, “The Plight of Native Americans.”

112. Jurmain and McCawley, O’ My Ancestor, 283.
Mo’e’hahne 143
Throughout the colonial history of Yaanga, material and necropolitical formations were
orchestrated according to the needs and desires of the settler-colonizing socialites who sought to
possess the land, become entrenched, and replace the Indigenous, even by coming to figure
themselves as the “native.” As regimes of Indigenous slaving engulfed Alta California, Yaanga
was selected as a site to expand New Spain’s colonial project through feeding the multiracial
colony a village of potential laboring Indigenous subjects. Indigenous subjects would be drawn
into the colony for nearly a century only to die and later be exhumed and discarded in order to
make space for more non-white and non-native colonizing structures that sought to carve out
their place on the occupied Gabrielino-Tongva earth. In the spaces of Yaanga, the Indigenous
was figured as docile, corporeal commodity and wandering tourist not capable of possessing any
inherent connections to the land. Through settler-colonial common sense apprehensions of time
and space, the relations of Indigeneity are not fixed; they can be reworked to accommodate and
reflect the new colonial biopolitics and the racialized hierarchies produced by urban settler
colonialism. The twenty-first-century practices of narrating colonial history and carving out its
spatial analogues, through forms like A People’s Guide to Los Angeles and La Plaza de Cultura y
Artes, seek to create a more racially diverse settler colonialism rather than dismantle the ongoing
colonization of Indigenous lives and lands. However, from its inception as an extension of the
Spanish crown’s colonial political economies, Los Angeles existed as a racially diverse settler
colony. With the rise of white US colonial hegemonies in the mid-nineteenth century, the rightful
possessive place of Mexican/American settler subjects within the colonial order was challenged.
Stories of racial violence have thus come to replace stories of colonial violence against
Indigenous peoples, even as contemporary spatial praxes that seek to affirm racially diversity
create new forms of anti-Indigenous violence. La Plaza de Cultura y Artes and the Indigenous
Mo’e’hahne 144
denigrations they produce represent forms of Mexican/American settler politics in occupied
Yaanga. These politics function normatively within the settler regimes of governmentality and
state forms of public commemoration by conceiving of redress in terms of the spatial and
cultural re/inclusion into the settler-colonial hegemony. For instance, in October 2014, La Plaza
de Cultura y Artes started the process of becoming a Smithsonian affiliated museum. As the US
settler colony’s central public, colonial archive, the Smithsonian now designates La Plaza as the
“nation’s premier center of Mexican American culture.”
113
La Plaza de Cultura y Artes has now
been fully incorporated into the public cultures of the settler-colonial hegemony.
While the colonial political economies have morphed over the centuries of occupation,
Indians can still be purchased in the spaces of El Pueblo. Vendors on Olvera Street sell
souvenirs, such as bags and clothing, decorated with (imagined) North American Indigenous
imagery, Indigenous faces, feathers, and headdresses. One shop even sells postcards with the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Indian portrait photography of Edward S. Curtis. One
day, I asked the shopkeeper why he sold the images. “They are classics,” he said. “Do you know
any Indians,” I asked. “Not like that, they are all gone.” he replied. I asked him where he was
from and he said Mexico and added that he had been living in the United States for twenty years.
“What about the Indians down there?” I asked. “Those are different, not like those,” he said,
pointing at the postcards. “You’re speaking to an Indian right now.” I said. “Why would you say
that?” he demanded. There was anger and bewilderment in this voice. “You’re not Indian,” he
said. For this Mexican/American shopkeeper, Indians only exist as pictorial historicized objects

113. County of Los Angeles Chief Executive Office. “CERTIFY THE FINAL ENVIRONMENTAL
IMPACT REPORT ADOPT.” October 28, 2014, accessed January 25, 2017.
hhttp://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/bos/bc/220413_CERTIFYTHEFINALENVIRONMENTALIMPACTREPORT.p
df; “LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes,” Smithsonian Magazine, accessed December 10, 2016,
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/museumday/venues/museum/la-plaza-de-cultura-y-artes/.

Mo’e’hahne 145
to be sold. A living and speaking Indigenous subject is beyond comprehension. For him, there is
no relationship between Indigenous peoples living south of the US-Mexico border and the
Indigenous peoples living to the north.
The settler colonization of Yaanga, which was and is carried out by non-white and white
socialites alike, rests on the continual abjection, objectification, and transiting of the Indigenous
body. In order to be replaced, the figure of Indigenous must either be eliminated or inhabited by
the colonizer. The Indigenous is corporeally drawn in to and consumed by the colonizing
necropolitics and abjected in settler-colonial signification as a transitable and lamentable past-
tense figure. The Indigenous body, however, continues to materially and ephemerally haunt the
spaces of Yaanga. When the corporeal specters of violence are unearthed, the living
Indigenous—who have never disappeared but are rendered invisible by biopolitical and material
structures settlement—come forward to speak for and protect the dead. Yet, Indigenous voices
seldom appear in the colonial archives and significations of Los Angeles. When they do, they are
prone to be reconfigured in service of the colonial order and retained as liminal shadow figures,
if not disappear completely. Because of the systemic and institutionalized silences and willful
unknowing within colonial signification (of which the construction of La Plaza de Cultural y
Artes and its burial gardens are exemplars), alternative sources of history and memory must be
engaged in order to fully perceive the arcs of colonial violence that unfold in the spaces of
Yaanga. The Indigenous voices captured and sometimes preserved in the local news-media
114

and documented by the California State Indian Heritage Commission and Los Angeles Native
American Indian Commission constitute significant alternative ways of knowing and perceiving

114. However, the news segment I watched in 2011 can no longer be found online. Indigenous voices
captured in colonial cultures are prone to disappear.

Mo’e’hahne 146
the colonial past and present. These alternative memory symbolics and the work of Indigenous
critical theorizing have the potential to “rupture”
115
the sites of settler-colonial memory making,
common sense, and regimes of power-knowledge that underwrite the materiality of the continued
colonial occupation of Yaanga.

115. Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells, 11.
Mo’e’hahne 147
Chapter Two:
Animating the Indigenous, Colonial Affects, and ‘Going Native’ in the City:
Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles

Released in 1961, The Exiles follows a day in the life of a group of Indigenous
migrants—Yvonne, the lead, Homer, her onscreen partner, and their friends Mary, Claudine,
Cliff, and Tommy—as they drink, shop, sing, fight and wander the spaces of Yaanga. The Exiles
was written and directed by Kent Mackenzie, a relatively unknown white, male, British
filmmaker, who was then a graduate student in film production at the University of Southern
California.
1
In a voiceover that opens the film, Mackenzie declares The Exiles to be “an authentic
account of twelve hours in the lives of a group of Indians who have come to Los Angeles…It
reflects a life that is not true of all Indians today, but typical of many.” In his master’s thesis,
however, Mackenzie, a self-described “auteur,” recounts a directorial method that is anything but
authentic: “If the action…developing in front of the camera ever seemed to be getting too
‘dramatic’…or if in any way the scene appeared to be taking on a formal structure,” he wrote, “I
would blow the scene apart by working with the Indians, [as he always called them] to make the
action more pointless and the dialog [sic] less coherent...I felt that this was a large part of the
quality of their lives and wanted the scenes to reflect this in every way.”
2
These two
statements—one detailing Mackenzie’s actual production methods and written for his thesis
readers, the other for cinema viewing publics—index the latent tensions between reality, filmic

1. Mackenzie, Kent Robert, director. The Exiles. 1961. Milestone Films, 2008.

2. Mackenzie, Kent Robert. A Description and Examination of the Production of The Exiles, A Film of the
Actual Life of a Group of Young American Indians (Thesis, University of Southern California, 1964), 42.

Mo’e’hahne 148
capture, and representation at the heart of a film that is often misread throughout its cultural life
as a documentary or an accurate historical text. The statements also reveal the ways that
Mackenzie apprehended and then animated Indigenous life in order to create The Exiles.
Indigenous life, in his eyes, was defined by pointless incoherence. However, Mackenzie
curiously writes in his master’s thesis that the film’s “subject matter...was no longer the real life
of the Indians, but what we had on film,” thus contradicting his previous fixations on
authenticity.
3

In this chapter, I consider the Indigenous figurations Mackenzie conjured onscreen
alongside the textual renderings of the Indigenous life and of Mackenzie’s own filmic practice
that he detailed in his critically neglected master’s thesis, A Description and Examination of the
Production of The Exiles, A Film of the Actual Life of a Group of Young American Indians.
Despite these claims of authenticity, the film exists uneasily between the genres of narrative and
the documentary as what some critics have called a “docudrama” and what Mackenzie described
in his master’s thesis as “somewhere between the traditional documentary and theatrical
formats.”
4

The Exiles has been celebrated by critics and independent cinema viewing publics as a
unique visual record of so-called urban American Indian life during the mid-twentieth century.
The film features an almost entirely Native cast, comprised of non-actors, who are for the
majority of the film located in the urban spaces of occupied Yaanga, rather than the rural spaces
of the Desert Southwest and Great Plains typically cathected to filmic Indigenous bodies. On the
surface, the Native cast appears to be figured outside of the stereotypical Indian roles of the

3. Ibid., 85.

4. Ibid., 15-16.
Mo’e’hahne 149
genre Westerns of the period. However, this spatial and temporal recasting is misleading. I argue
The Exiles merely reworked tropes of Indigenous abjection drawn from colonial common sense
and regimes of settler sexuality and maps them onto the exemplarily colonial geographies of the
settler metropolis of downtown Los Angeles.
The Exiles was in part rediscovered through settler-colonial nostalgia for the film’s
representations of the “lost” multiracial, low income spaces of Bunker Hill remade by urban
settler development. For instance, Thom Andersen’s 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself
emphasizes The Exiles’ representations of the remade spaces of Bunker Hill while only briefly
noting the filmic Indian lives.
5
Following the renewed interest in the film, the UCLA Film and
Television Archive, USC Moving Image Archive, and Milestone Films collaborated to restore
and rerelease the film onto DVD in 2008. Milestone Films approached Indigenous author and
filmmaker Sherman Alexie and African/American filmmaker Charles Burnett to “present” The
Exiles to the public.
6
Upon its rerelease, the film received positive reviews, with mainstream
media often misreading the film as a documentary. Indian Country Today was one of the few
venues to publish more critical responses.
7
The Exiles continues to have an enduring cultural and
social life and has become part of the Los Angeles public colonial culture. In the fall of 2015,
The Exiles was shown as part of a Los Angeles history film series organized by the LA County
Transit Authority. The free screening was held at Union Station, which sits just blocks away
from Yaanga and the remade spaces of Bunker Hill. Afterwards, Ross Lipman, a white male film

5. Los Angeles Plays itself, Directed by Thom Andersen. 2003. New York: Cinema Guild, 2014, DVD.

6. Milestone Films. “The Exiles Press Kit.” www.exilesfilm.com/ExilesPK.pdf.Accessed 15 Jan. 2015, 4,
2.
7. For normative critical receptions see Matthew Fleischer, “Exiles on Main Street: Searching for the
Ghosts of Bunker Hill’s Native American Past.” LA Weekly, 13 Aug. 2008, http://www.laweekly.com/film/exiles-
on-main-street-searching-for-the-ghosts-of-bunker-hills-native-american-past-2154829, accessed 10 October 2013.
For more nuanced readings see Rob Capriccioso, “‘The Exiles’: An Appreciation.” Indian Country Today, 28 Jan.
2009,12.
Mo’e’hahne 150
restorationist who worked on The Exiles re-release but had no expertise in North American
Indigenous history, praised Mackenzie’s technological innovations and described the harsh
portrayals of Indian life as realistic.
Through practices that resemble what Jose Muñoz has theorized as “disidentification,” the
film has been transformed into an enduring symbol of Indian Los Angeles by Indigenous artists.
Disidentifying subjects, according to Muñoz, do not dispel the “ideologically contradictory
elements” of a text, “rather like a melancholic subject holding on to a lost object... [they work] to
hold onto this object and invest it with new life.”
8
Indigenous artists have resignified The Exiles
both in complex and uncritical ways (not unlike Alexie’s appraisal and relationship with the
film) in attempts to invest it with new meaning. For example, when the film was re-released onto
DVD, Apache artist Douglas Miles, the founder of Apache Skateboards company that hails from
the same reservation as Yvonne, the film’s lead, created a series of skateboard decks featuring
images of the Native cast. The series was exhibited in Los Angeles to commemorate the film.
9

Through the 2014 photo series “Legacy of Exiled NDNz,” Los Angeles based, Navajo
photographer Pamela Peters sought to recreate imagines from the film with contemporary
migrant Indigenous youth living in Los Angeles. According to Peters, she created the series to
“pay tribute” to Indigenous people who participated in the mid-twentieth-century federal
relocation programs and to “change the negative and inaccurate views” of Native people.
10

8. Jose Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 12.

9. Matthew Fleischer, “Art of The Exiles,” LA Weekly, 14 August, 2008,
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2008/10/art_of_the_exiles.php?print=true, accessed 10 October, 2013.

10. Lisa Napoli, “Photographing the modern Native American Experience,” Which Way L.A., National
Public Radio, KCRW, January 1, 2014, http://blogs.kcrw.com/whichwayla/2014/01/the-modern-native-american-
experience-through-a-young-navajo-photographers-lens, accessed January 10, 2014; Pamela J. Peters, “Legacy of
Exiled NDNz,” http://www.gofundme.com/LAUrbanNdN, accessed February 10, 2014.
Mo’e’hahne 151
Understanding Mackenzie’s Indigenous figurations, which have become part of the public
iconographies of Los Angeles,
11
is contingent upon locating The Exiles in relation to well-worn
forms of Indian imagining in the settler-colonial cultures of North America broadly and the mid-
twentieth-century forms Indigenous figuration and the colonial affects specifically. According to
N. Scott Momaday, practices of Indian hating are always underwritten by settler-colonial
morality claims.
12
In this chapter, I posit that Mackenzie’s filmic Indigenous imaginings reveal
similar affective undercurrents through settler-colonial structures of feeling. For Mackenzie, the
figure of the Indian becomes an affective repository for his anxieties about colonialism, gender,
and sexuality. For instance, Mackenzie wrote that The Exiles was his “attempt to express the
inner emotional patterns” of a young group of Indians. The Indian lives that Mackenzie animated
onscreen are thus more reflective of the colonial power matrix and settler affective economies
than the realities of Indigenous life, as the filmmaker would have us believe. Importantly,
Momaday, would go on to further engaged the precarities of urban colonial life for Indigenous
migrants to Yaanga in the 1968 novel House Made of Dawn, portions of which are set in 1952
Los Angeles and transpire in the same spaces that Mackenzie filmically captured.
13
Momaday,
however, offers innumerably more thoughtful considerations of Indigenous affective worlds of
migration and dis/location.

11. For example, similarly to Thom Anderson’s film Los Angeles Plays Itself, Norman M. Klein reads the
film as a text that marks the disappearance and re/making of downtown through tropes of noir. In A Peoples’ Guide,
Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng list The Exiles as an additional text for readers that are interested in learning more
about Indigenous life in downtown. See Norman M. Klien, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure
of Memory (London: Verso, 2008).

12. Momaday “The Morality of Indian Hating,” 36.

13. Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 122-126.

Mo’e’hahne 152
Moving-Image Indians:
The spaces of cinema have been significant pedagogical instruments in the creation and
dissemination of colonial common sense knowledge about Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
In Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick argues that “the Indian”
has been among the most often re-presented and pliable subjects in American cinema. However,
according to Kilpatrick, “film is more than the instrument of representation, it is also the object
of representation. It is not a reflection or a refraction of the ‘real’; instead it is like a photograph
of a the mirrored reflection of a painted image.”
14
Rather than representing “real” Indigenous
subjects or lifeways, according to Kilpatrick, filmic Indians reflect the “dialogically” crafted
“American self -definition” that is “repeatedly reinforced by its juxtaposition to the image of
Native Americans.”
15
Like the reflection of an already painted image, the moving images of
Indian savagery, stupidity, and sexuality exist as oppositional repositories of Indigenous othering
against which the settler culture defines its structural and cultural dominance. Cinema, Kilpatrick
observes, while representing technological innovation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, merely adopted and reworked narrative and symbolic structures of Indian imagining
that had been practiced in Euroamerican colonial culture since the seventeenth century.
Kilpatrick offers a genealogy of colonial cultural forms that predated and influenced Indigenous
figurations in American cinema. For instance, tales of Indian savagery were popularly circulated
in early colonial travel writing, the novel—particularly the genre Western—theatre, the dime
novel of the mid-nineteenth century (similar to Pulp writing), and eventually the Wild West

14. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1999), xv.

15. Ibid., xvi-xvii.

Mo’e’hahne 153
Shows of the late nineteenth century.
16
By the time Thomas Edison’s penny arcade “peep shows”
appeared in 1894, four years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, Kilpatrick writes, narratives of
fated and vanishing Indians where in wide circulation. Like the proliferation of still image
photography of American Indians, narratives of Indigenous disappearance prompted a rush to
capture and produce moving image Indians. Therefore, it is no surprise that Edison’s first “film
vignettes,” which mark the birth of cinema, included films such as Sioux Ghostdance (1894), of
which there is no evidence that dance was a “Ghostdance;” Parade of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
(1898), Procession of Mounted Indians and Cowboys (1898), and Buck Dance (1898).
17

Similarly, Michelle Raheja, argues that “film and visual culture have provided the primary
representational field in which Native American images have been displayed to dominant culture
audiences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”
18
As technologies of capture that are
enmeshed in the mechanics of “reproduction,”
19
film functions as a popular, virtual colonial
archive, that is mass produced and widely consumed by colonial publics. Rather than permitting
the counter hegemonic reading praxes that Walter Benjamin envisioned by transforming the
viewer into a critic,
20
the dissemination of filmic Indians creates colonial publics who see
themselves as Indian experts. Settler public understandings of the possibilities for Indigenous life
and embodiment are, therefore, disciplined by the colonial cinema archive. Filmic Indigenous

16. Ibid., 2-12.

17. Ibid., 16-17.

18. Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Realism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of
Native Americans in Film, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), ix.

19. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt, Trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217-222.

20. Ibid., 228.

Mo’e’hahne 154
figurations, thus, represent a virtual-media economy of Indigenous bodies in which the
Indigenous are visually consumed and traded. Considering the genealogical nature and archiving
practices of settler cinemas of the Indian help to contextualize Mackenzie’s filmic practice. As I
will show, Mackenzie similarly embarked on his own tour of the colonial archives and crafted
versions of himself in the moving-image Indian, while constructing his own filmic Los Angeles
Indian archive.
Following Stuart Hall’s theorization of the “encoding” and “decoding” of visual and
textual media,
21
Indigenous critical theorists have also analyzed the counter-hegemonic traces
present in moving-images Indians. In Reservation Realism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and
Representations of Native Americans in Film, Michelle Raheja argues that film has also “been
key to formulating Indigenous people’s own self images.”
22
By reading films from the silent era,
Raheja argues that Indigenous on-screen performers, in fact, used the medium of film and the
virtual spaces it offered to play with dominant narratives of Indigenous life while using the
spaces of filmic performance to address their own culture and political needs. Similar to Jose
Muñoz theory of “disidentification,” Raheja argues that Indigenous viewers can also interpret
stereotypical Indian texts in counter hegemonic ways. I will consider to the possibilities of
Indigenous interpretations of The Exiles later. However, how Mackenzie arrived at the filmic
spaces of his future film are as instructive of settler-colonial racial affects as is the history of
settler cinemas of the Indian.

21. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding. Culture, media, language,” in Eds. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson,
Andrew Lowe, and Paul Williams Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson), 128-138.

22. Raheja, Reservation Realism, ix.
Mo’e’hahne 155
“I Lost My Identity on Main Street”
Mackenzie’s morality of Indian pity originated from a personal encounter with a narrative
of Indigenous loss that circulated within colonial signification. Mackenzie conceived of the
project after reading an article in Harper’s Magazine, titled “The Raid on the Reservations.”
23
It
detailed the massive seizures of Native land that were taking place through federal termination
policy.
24
Termination, which lasted from the nineteen forties to the nineteen seventies, stripped
Indigenous people of their tribal recognition and liquidated tribal reservations. Relocation
policies, which began during the Second World War and lasted until the nineteen seventies,
sought to de-indigenize Native people through what Lorenzo Veracini has called administrative
“transfer,” by moving Native people to cities.
25
Mackenzie wrote that he set out to “go to war via
the film medium” on behalf of “the Indian.” However, such critical politics are absent from the
film. Mackenzie initially wanted to make a film about “the problems of Indian assimilation” by
telling the story of Apache family that relocated from the “reservation” in Arizona to Los
Angeles. But his grant proposal was turned down.
26

Before starting the project, Mackenzie immersed himself in webs of colonial common
sense that had been amassed about Indigenous people in literature, anthropology, and American
settler cinema. Mackenzie read, “everything about Indians [he] could get his hands on. From the
library, from newspapers, anthropological journals, pulp magazines—anything that was about
Indians, historical or contemporary, good or bad—I absorbed,” he wrote. “I saw all the films I

23. Dorothy Van de Mark, “The Raid on the Reservations.” Harper’s Magazine, 1 Mar. 1956, vol. 212,
no.1270, pp. 48-53.

24. Mackenzie, A Description and Examination, 22.

25. Donald L. Fixico, Termination and Relocation,134-137; Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 33.

26. Mackenzie, A Description and Examination, 21-22.
Mo’e’hahne 156
could about Indians, both documentary and feature.” For instance, Mackenzie describes Robert
Flaherty’s pseudo-ethnographic “docudrama” films Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana
(1926), both of which are abound with filmic Indigenous ventriloquism, as inspirations.
Propelling the cycle of misreading settler “docudramas” that feature Indigenous subjects,
Mackenzie misinterprets Flaherty’s films as documentaries, much like the critics who would
later misread The Exiles. Mackenzie absorbed all the colonial textural renderings of the
Indigenous he could find: “I steeped myself in Indian legends, and with more time I would have
learned an Indian language to better understand their thought patterns.”
27
Mackenzie first
encountered Indians in colonial representational culture rather than as living subjects. Like an
anthropologist preparing for an ethnographic journey, Mackenzie turned to the colonial archive
to learn about the Indigenous. Reinforcing colonial, racial hierarchies, he wanted to learn an
Indigenous language to better comprehend Indian thought. Mackenzie’s first forays into
fieldwork were speaking with “Indian and non-Indian ‘experts.’” He met with Bureau of Indian
Affairs employees, anthropologists, as well as “professional Indians, social workers, ministers,
educators, and Indian organizations.” He even met with tribal leaders on an unnamed Arizona
reservation. Mackenzie, however, did not find these Indians to be compelling filmic subjects. “It
was difficult… to get past these successful, assimilated, English-speaking individuals to find out
what the average Indian was like,” he wrote. Rather than working with Indigenous people who
would share their experiences of the structural violences of colonialism and relocation, he sought
out Indians “who weren’t conscious of their relationship to society or themselves as problems.”
28

27. Mackenzie also lists Louisiana Story (1946), another Flaherty docudrama, that however does not
feature Indigenous subjects as an inspiration. Mackenzie, A Description and Examination, 21,11; The Exiles Press
Kit ,3.

28. Mackenzie, A Description and Examination, 21-23.
Mo’e’hahne 157
For Mackenzie, authentic Indians were not acculturated or politicized. Authentic Indigenous
people are unable to articulate their subjectivity and required a white, male colonial gaze and
interpellation to represent them.
Mackenzie found the Indigenous people he was looking for while drinking in the bars on
Main Street that were frequented by Indians. Mackenzie had previously made a documentary
short Bunker Hill—1956 profiling the neighborhood (without any Indigenous figurations), and
was seemingly familiar with spaces where Indians could be found. The spaces of Bunker Hill,
writes Mike Davis, have “played” iconic roles in the history of Los Angeles cinema, having
continually been refigured through noir tropes.
29
Mackenzie, following these patterns of settler
cinema chose to locate his noir narrative of Indigenous dislocation in these same spaces.
Employing pseudo-ethnographic methods during this period of “firsthand contact,” Mackenzie
spent months getting to know the group. He proposed the film to the group as a collaboration
stressing that he “wanted to smash the stereotypes” and wanted their help writing the script and
narrations. However, revealing his true film auteur approach to production, Mackenzie wrote in
his thesis that he “felt strongly that [The Exiles] should be under the supervision of one mind
from early research through final editing—a ‘film author.’ ”
30

Mackenzie “gradually lost [his] identity on Main street,” writing that, “I began to identify
very strongly with [the Indians]. I started to walk like them, to drink what they drank, to try their
language, to think in their terms, and to have some of their desires…I admired their lack of
restraint and rebelliousness far beyond the seemingly constricted lives of my own middle class

29. Mike Davis, “Bunker Hill: Hollywood’s Dark Shadow,” in Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice eds.
Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Hoboken: Wiley, 2011).

30. Ibid., 23-24.

Mo’e’hahne 158
social group” [emphasis added].
31
Through this ethnography of drinking, Mackenzie saw himself
becoming Indian. In both his embodied practice and writing, Mackenzie performed what Shari
Huhndorf theorizes as “going native.” Mackenzie went Native in the bars and streets of
downtown Los Angeles in an attempt to “resolve [his] ambivalence about [urban settler]
modernity as well as anxieties about” anti-Indigenous violence, and relocation and termination
policies.
32
According to Philip Deloria, in the early years of the Cold War, Indian play thrived
among white male middle-class subjects, like Mackenzie, who sought an escape from the
regimes of wage labor and sub/urban life. These subjects created back-to-the-land oriented
hobbyist organizations that donned Indian garb and lived out fantasy Indigenous lives.
33
Rather
than playing Indian in the rural spaces of occupied North America, Mackenzie found an urban
tribe to facilitate an escape from the “constrictions” of his “middle class” normative white
masculinity. However, as Mackenzie’s filmic and textual Indian hating demonstrates, the
experience was, as Huhndorf theorizes, a “means of defining and regenerating” his colonial
whiteness.
34
Mackenzie’s urban (filmic) Indian play also served as an affective orientation for his
colonial affects, pity for the Indigenous, and perhaps guilt about federal termination and
relocation policies. However, by eliding politicized Indigenous voices and focusing on drinking
Indigenous subjects, Mackenzie pushed the structures of anti-Indigenous violence to the margins
of his film. Mackenzie also apprehended the Indigenous experiences and embodiments on Main
Street as more available and transitable than those of the politicized Indian experts. He saw

31. Ibid., 25.

32. Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native, 2-5.

33. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian,128-135.

34. Huhndorf, Going Native, 5.

Mo’e’hahne 159
himself reflected in his film subjects: “Homer was me looking out at a world he couldn’t quite
comprehend,” Mackenzie wrote. While his colonial affects of pity for Indigenous subjects found
other gendered, scopophilic orientations: “I was in love with Yvonne in an abstract way.”
35

Before filming, Mackenzie recorded hours of interviews with the cast and planned for them
to reenact their daily routines on film. The images would then be paired with the audio from the
interviews. However, filming took place exclusively at night because the cast had to work during
the day. No footage exists of the cast participating in regimes of colonial wage labor or
education. There is only footage of nocturnal leisure activities, most of which involve drinking.
In fact, Yvonne’s off-screen partner had to quit the film because he worked at night. So, he was
replaced by Homer who did not work nights. Such depictions obscure the lived experience of
Native migrants to Yaanga, many of whom, as Ned Blackhawk demonstrates in “I Can Carry On
from Here: The Relocation of American Indians to Los Angeles,” received job training and
schooling through the relocation programs and participated in the labor market.
36
The Native cast
also received no wages. Mackenzie wrote that “[e]xcept for a token sum for shooting the last
sequence, the Indians received no money. Instead they were compensated with food, money, and
help with personal problems,” which also included bail money. The cast was, however, paid in
alcohol. Mackenzie wrote that the crew often spent considerable time waiting for “the Indians”
to get drunk enough to perform. Some of the staged fights they wanted to film ended up being
actual fights.
37

35. Mackenzie, A Description and Examination, 25.

36. Ned Blackhawk, “I Can Carry On from Here: The Relocation of American Indians to Los Angeles,”
Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 11, no. 2, Autumn 1995, 21-22.

37. Mackenzie, A Description and Examination, 17.
Mo’e’hahne 160

Alcohol and Indigenous Labor in Yaanga
The relations of Indigenous labor that Mackenzie created in order to produce The Exiles
resemble and recreate the regimes of Indigenous (slave) labor and criminality that Spanish,
Mexican, and Anglo/white American settlers employed in the Los Angeles colony throughout
the nineteenth century. Indigenous laborer in the colony was almost always bound to alcohol. For
instance, settlers converted much of the Gabrielino-Tongva lands into lucrative wine vineyards.
The Indigenous laborers were forced to work in the most labor intensive tasks. They would be
stripped down to nothing but “loin-cloth” and made to stomp grapes by foot in a large vats from
“morning till night.”
38
Horace Bell, a white Los Angeles colonist during the mid nineteenth
century, describes how Indians laborers were compensated and engulfed in the repressive labor
regimes:
The cultivators of the vineyards commenced paying the Indian peons with aguardiente, a
veritable fire-water and no mistake. The consequence as that on being paid off on
Saturday evening, they would meet in a great gathering called peons, and pass the night
in gambling, drunkenness and debaucher. On Sunday, the streets would be crowded from
morn tip night with Indians, males and females of all ages, from the girl of ten or twelve,
to the old man and woman of seventy or eighty…About sundown the pompous
marshal…would drive and drag the herd to a big corral in the rear of Downey Block,
where they would sleep away their intoxication, and in the morning they would be
exposed for sale, as slaves for the week. Los Angeles had its slave mart, as well as New
Orleans and Constantinople—only the slave at Los Angeles was sold fifty-two times a
year as long as he lived, which did not generally exceed one, two, or three years…the
new dispensation…Those thousands of honest, useful people were absolutely destroyed
in this way [emphasis added].
39

38. Philips “Indians in Los Angeles,” 444.

39. Horace Bell was an early white American settler to the Los Angeles colony who worked as a California
Ranger and journalist. This passage from his memoir has become an often cited/circulated moment in the emerging
historiography of Los Angeles anti-Indigenous violence. I first encountered in a popular oriented Los Angeles
history. However, the passage has been recirculated in recent scholarship on Los Angeles settler-colonial violence.
See W.W. Robinson, Los Angeles: A Profile (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1968), 46; and Benjamin Madley,
“Unholy Traffic in Human Blood and Souls’’: Systems of California Indian Servitude under US Rule,” Pacific
Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, pages 626–667. The passage above is cited in Philips “Indians in Los Angeles,”
445; Horace Bell Reminiscences of a Ranger, or Early times in Southern California. (Los Angeles, 1881).
Mo’e’hahne 161

After the US occupation began, US records indicate that local ranchers assembled downtown
every Monday morning for twenty years to bid on the Indian prisoners that had been paid in
alcohol for their labor on Friday and then arrested for “public drunkenness” over the weekend.
According to Bell, in the Los Angeles slave mart the Indigenous slave was sold dozens of time a
year and worked to death. Such labor practices explain the Indigenous population collapse in Los
Angeles by 1870. The nights of drunken debauchery and fights that Mackenzie captured on film
by compensating his Native cast in alcohol extended patterns of Indigenous abjection practiced
by the previous colonizers into the twentieth century (and beyond with the continued circulation
of the film in the public cultures of Los Angeles).

The Exiles and Indigenous Speech
Dialogue editing is noticeably rough throughout the film. Images of speaking subjects
frequently do not match the sound. The dialogue often meanders. Original dialogue was not used
in the final cut because Mackenzie could not afford to hire a sound recordist or rent the necessary
equipment. The majority of the dialogue in the film was, therefore, recorded after the scenes
were photographed or taken from the interview recordings. Much of the sonic material used to
represent what Mackenzie imagined the Indians’ “inner emotions” to be was taken from the
interviews he conducted separately with the principal cast: Homer, Tommy, and Yvonne.
40

During the interviews, which sometimes required alcohol, Mackenzie repeatedly
questioned the cast until he got the responses he was looking for. “I was not after information,”

40. Recordings of the onsite background noise, dialogue, and Mackenzie’s “directions to the Indians” were
made, however, the quality was not sufficient to be included in the film. Mackenzie A Description and Examination,
73, 2.

Mo’e’hahne 162
he wrote “but an emotional quality and general attitudes and feelings.”
41
The Indians “on Main
Street,” Mackenzie wrote, “seldom spoke of important matters directly; they seldom spoke
clearly and coherently when they did speak…their everyday language was full of overlaps,
interruptions, and communication through looks, gestures, and shrugs…What a person said
seemed less important than how he said it.” The affective register of the Indigenous voice was
more important than what was said. Mackenzie figures Indigenous speech, and thus Indigenous
culture, as rhetorically and grammatically incoherent. Indigenous communication is primitive
and transpires despite and beyond the verbal language used, through affect and bodily
movement. Mackenzie apprehended Indigenous life in such a way that the images of the
Indian—and thus Indigenous embodiments—do not have to correspond to the sonics of
Indigenous speech. The Indian as an image, like the Indigenous as a figuration in colonial
cultures, is always already separated from the Indian as a speaking and living subject. “We
would use all the…normal elements of the Indians’ speech patterns,” Mackenzie wrote, “and
would treat this dialog [sic], not as the most important element of communication in the film, but
merely as another sound effect in the environment.”
42
Indian speech is, therefore, rendered as a
sonic mise-en-scène; the speaking Indigenous subject is collapsed into the surrounding
environment.
This Indigenous figuration reinscribes what Denise da Silva theorizes as the condition of
“affectability.” Within post-Enlightenment thought, the logic of affectability holds that the others
of Europe are incapable of self-determination, are equated with nature, and are subjected to the

41. Ibid., 78.

42. Ibid., 73-74.

Mo’e’hahne 163
impositions of superior racial subjects. da Silva argues this configuration of power was
reinforced through colonial anthropology—the very literatures in which Mackenzie first
consumed the Indigenous before embarking on his ethnographic journey.
43
While animating the
speaking Indigenous, “[i]n a few cases,” Mackenzie writes, “we had to go so far as to actually
construct words out of consonants and sound drawn from other words” in order “to clarify badly
slurred or mumbled” words. Mackenzie creates the ultimate relations of what Patrick Wolfe calls
“ethnographic ventriloquism” wherein the Indigenous subjects captured on film are foreclosed
from ever speaking in ways that are unmediated by the colonial auteur.
44
The speaking
Indigenous subject is conjured by dissecting Indigenous speech into separate phones and then
amalgamating the pieces into new words.

Locating the Indigenous
The Exiles opens with a series of stills that transition from the Indian portraits and Western
landscapes of the late-nineteenth century by American photographer Edward S. Curtis to
portraits of the film’s principal cast, which are framed similarly to the Curtis portraits. These
images, which feature Teepees and figures on horseback, are presented against a Southern Plains
style powwow song while a voice-over narration declares:
Once, the American Indian lived in the ordered freedom of his own culture. Then in the
nineteenth century, the white man confined him within the boundaries of the tribal
reservation…Many of their children stayed on the reservation, but others of a new
generation wandered into the cities.

Mackenzie begins by locating “proper” Indigeneity in places and times other than the urban

43. Denise da Silva, Toward A Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007),
44-48.
44. Mackenzie, A Description and Examination 92; Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the
Transformation of Anthropology, 213.
Mo’e’hahne 164
colonial spaces of Yaanga. Authentic Indigeneity only exists in the imagined pre-contact
geographies of the desert Southwest and the Great Plains or the carceral grids of rural
reservations—manufactured by the eliminatory organs of settler statecraft—which is where
Curtis actually photographed his Indigenous subjects in the late-ninetieth and early twentieth-
centuries. Mackenzie collapses Indigenous geographies and cultures as the Indian is only
represented as hailing from cultures of the Great Plains or the Southwest. However, none of The
Exiles’ Native cast are members of Plains tribes. Yvonne is Western Apache, from the Desert
Southwest. Homer is identified as Hualapai, also people of the Desert Southwest, whereas Cliff
is identified as Choctaw, a Southeastern culture.
Figure 2. Opening title sequence, The Exiles (1961)

Mackenzie’s voice-over curiously uses the verb “wander”—with its implication of
Mo’e’hahne 165
aimless or accidental movement—to describe Native migration to the city. The film thus belies
the federal relocation programs that brought nearly 30,000 Indigenous migrants to Yaanga
between 1952 and 1976.
45
The trope of Indian wandering, which also reinforces the notion of
Indigenous socialities as nomadic and unsettled—signified first in the Curtis images—can be
found throughout the film, particularly in the putatively non-indigenous urban spaces. For
example, there are several sequences of Homer walking through downtown drinking; he and a
friend are staged moving through the brightly lit Third Street tunnel as cars pass them by.
Yvonne is photographed wandering up and down the street window-shopping, while her voice-
over narration speaks of desiring a better life and leaving the reservation for the city.
Additionally, after leaving the bar, the group of friends featured throughout the film recklessly
joyride through the streets and tunnels of downtown drinking and laughing with no clear
destination.
46

Mackenzie apprehends the spaces and times of occupied Yaanga through a familiar
representational strategy of settlerism. He casts the Indigenous migrants as out of place in the
urban settler space which is naturalized as non-native, while the actual Indigenous Gabrielino-
Tongva and Fernandeño-Tataviam, who have been living in the region for thousands of years, go
entirely unacknowledged. Furthermore, the sign “exile,” which frames the entire project, implies
that the Native people in the film have been dislocated from their homelands, migrated to the city
without any agency, and are unable to return to their homeslands. This is contrary to the fluid
movements between and through rural and urban space that Ned Blackhawk has documented

45. Weibel-Orlando, Indian Country L.A., 15-18.

46. My analysis here is indebted to my conversations and collaborations with Alex Trimble Young, see
Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne and Alex Trimble Young “Indigenous Mobility and Settler State Transfer: The Exiles in
Historical Context, “Transfers 5(3), Winter 2015, 146–150.
Mo’e’hahne 166
throughout the relocation era as well as the social networks of connectivity that Indigenous
migrants created during this period.

Colonial Scopophilia, Violence, and Indigenous Sexualities
The Exiles pathologizes Indigenous gender and sexual formations in relation to an
imagined white, heteronormative domesticity. Feminist psychoanalytic theories offer useful
frameworks for reading and denaturalizing Mackenzie’s moving-image Indians. “Playing on the
tensions between film as controlling the dimensions of time (editing, narrative) and film as
controlling the dimensions of space (changes in distance, editing),” writes Laura Mulvey, “the
cinematic co-create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the
measure of desire.”
47
Reworking Freudian and Lacian psychoanalysis, Mulvey posits that the
gendered and sexual norms of cinema visually recreate relations of scopophilia (“pleasure in
looking”) through its “anthropomorphic” focus “on the human form,” thus fulfilling “a
primordial wish for pleasurable looking.”
48
Although Mulvey’s foundational essay, “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” appeared at time when feminist theories naturalized the
categories of woman and man as cisgendered while also assuming a white subject, her
observations are useful in thinking through the relations of colonial affect and visuality in The
Exiles. Reflecting on the history of film, Mulvey argues that cinema forces a white male gaze
upon all viewers and, thus, normatively represents “female” subjects for the affective viewing
pleasures of the nominal (white) male spectator. “[P]leasure in looking is,” therefore, “split

47. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989), 25.

48. Ibid., 17.

Mo’e’hahne 167
between active/male and passive/female.”
49
Mulvey continues, “[i]n their traditional exhibitionist
role,” women in cinema “are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance
coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-
ness. Women displayed as sexual object[s] is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle.”
50
According to
Mulvey, the normative uses of the moving image found in cinema also create the relations of a
“mirror stage” where the viewer comes to recognize themselves in the images of the filmic
performers. These visual configurations are also affectively and erotically charged. According to
Mulvey, “the position of spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their
exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer” (emphasis added).
51

Mackenzie’s figures the Indigenous as the passive, non-normative (rather than merely feminized)
subjects that bear the look of the white male colonial spectator. By filmically animating and
capturing Indigenous life, through these relations of scopophilia, Mackenzie comes to
symbolically possess the Indian as well as possessively identify with the Indian, for as he wrote,
“I began to identify very strongly with [the Indians].” Additionally, according to Mulvey, the
“conditions of screening” film in the dark spaces of the theatre coupled with the cinema’s
narrative conventions “promotes the illusion of voyeuristic separation” for the viewer. This
practice of cinema viewing, therefore, “give[s] the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private
world.”
52
Through The Exiles, Mackenzie created his own private world in the spaces of Bunker

49. Ibid., 19.

50. Ibid., 19. Mulvey continues: “The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as the representative
of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise
the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle.” Ibid., 25.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 17.

Mo’e’hahne 168
Hill and the virtual spaces of film, one that was populated with Indians. By viewing the printed
footage and rearranging it through the auteur processes of editing, Mackenzie was able to return
to this private world of aberrant urban Indians again and again.
Judith Butler has also reworked Lacan’s theorization of the “phallus” within the social-
psychological imaginary. Butler posits that regardless of the sexed and gendered identity of a
filmmaker, the camera can come to represent/replace the phallus as a “signifier” of privilege
within the symbolic order. While Butler offers readings of “phantasmic” moments of
resignifying practices with counter hegemonic potential (in the case of trans/gendered
embodiments), applying Butler’s formulations to Mackenzie’s scopophilic filmic practices
further reveals the colonial power relations implicit in The Exiles’ filmic capture praxes. As a
potential phallus, the camera, therefore, always exists as an object invested with sexed and
gendered meaning.
53

Native women are depicted as being subjected to overt and subtle gendered violence at the
hands of Native men throughout The Exiles. Native women are also the only laboring Native
subjects represented in the film, as they perform domestic labor for the men. For instance,
following the scenes of Yvonne shopping for food, which are accompanied by her narrations of
desiring a better life for her child to come, she is shown preparing a meal for Homer and his
friends. In another voice-over, Yvonne says she always tries to be a good wife and wishes Homer
would stop drinking and get his life together. The men are shown watching television and eating
before they go out drinking. Yvonne spends most of the evening alone engaged in commercial
consumption: going to the cinema and window-shopping.
Mackenzie also represents Native sexuality as violent and non-normative. After the

53. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), 88-
91.
Mo’e’hahne 169
sequences of drinking and driving through the dark streets and tunnels of downtown, Cliff jerks
the car into a filling station. Captured in the high contrast, black and white photography, the
well-lit station registers as a bright white space that stands in contrast to the dark night and the
shadowy moments of drunken laughter the group had shared. In the backseat, Tommy tries to
kiss Claudine. Claudine laughs and gives him a chaste kiss, before pushing him away softly,
slapping him in the face, and knocking off his hat. Mary and Cliff laugh and watch from the front
seat, however, Mary’s facial expressions signal annoyance and caution. Tommy pushes the front
seat forward bumping Mary as he jumps out of the car to retrieve his hat. As Tommy stumbles to
his feet his voice-over narration begins: “I mean I don’t like to make a fool out of myself,” he
says, “but I like to drink and you know when I’m gonna do something I want to do it. When I
booze I’m not gonna sip on a drink. I like to drink and get high, that’s the reason drinks are for”.
The voice-over—the sonic traces of Tommy’s interview, during which, according to Mackenzie
“Tommy was quite high”—is intended to capture the character’s bleak interiority.
54
His narration
pauses and a laboring white, male station attendant walks over, speaks to Cliff, and fills up the
car. Tommy’s voice-over resumes as he staggers away from the car and beckons for Cliff to join
him:
I just want to have my good kicks. When I’m with somebody I just have my kicks, she
has her kicks…as long as she understands me I don’t care what she does. Because If I
have to worry about every little thing everyday that happens...or she might cut out on me,
worry about this or rent or…light and gas…I figure that a person that lives a regular life
lives in worse world that I do…I don’t want a regular life, you know poached eggs, you
know and Ovaltine and stuff [like] that in the morning and getting in bed at certain times,
have someone kiss me every night you know or have somebody that I trust…

Tommy does not care what his partners do as long as they understand him and they both get their
“kicks.” He is not interested in the norms of heterosexual monogamy and domesticity, norms that

54. Mackenzie, A Description and Examination, 80.
Mo’e’hahne 170
he represents through potential affective attachments such as wondering if his partner will leave
him, having someone to kiss every night, and having someone to trust. Tommy also rejects the
confines, cultural orientations, and regulated temporalities of mid-twentieth-century wage labor,
along with its attendant consumer and reproductive norms.
As Tommy’s voice-over continues, the men attempt to lure Claudine away from the car
and into the shadows, presumably to have sex with her. They hold her by the arms and walk her
way from the car laughing. Here, Native hetero/sexuality is figured as non-normative as two men
potentially desire group sex with a Native woman. Claudine, however, turns around and walks
back to the car several times as the men continue trying to move her into the shadows. Tommy’s
voice-over ends, and we hear him say to Claudine, “Hey, you look like a squaw there.” Tommy
slaps Claudine’s butt and they all laugh. Later, Cliff and Tommy make Mary pay for the gas.
When Mary exits the car, the men grab at her arms and wrists and make noise as she walks.
Tommy follows her to the bathroom. Mary spends too much time in the restroom—presumably
taking a break from the men. Tommy bangs on the door but she does not come out and the men
leave her at the station. The white, male station attendant watches the scene unfold through the
large glass windows of the station. The attendant, Mackenzie’s only on-screen embodiment,
symbolizes his scopophilic gaze which is fixated on the “unrestrained” filmic Indian lives he has
created.
In this scene, the men only engage the Native women as sexualized objects and sources of
money while Tommy uses the abjecting sign “squaw” to refer to Claudine. Rayna Green
observes that in Euroamerican colonial culture, the squaw exists as a disposable sexual subject
and social pollutant for white colonizing heteropatriarchy, one that must be discarded or
Mo’e’hahne 171
destroyed after she is used.
55
By uttering “squaw” in a moment where he grabs and slaps one
woman and chases the other, Tommy embodies colonial practices of objectifying and violating
Native women. Tommy behaves the most violently towards the Native women. However,
Tommy is, in fact, a Mexican/American who plays Indian throughout the film and his
Mexicanness is unacknowledged onscreen.
56
Tommy’s Indian play is another representation that
produces Indianness as an always already available embodiment for non-native subjects in the
worlds of The Exiles.
Roderick Ferguson has importantly demonstrated that for nearly a hundred years early-
twentieth-century ethnographies of African/American sexuality and nightlife in Chicago worked
to regulate normative, white, common sense conceptions of sexual and gender deviance by
tethering them to racialized bodies.
57
Mackenzie’s mid-twentieth-century pseudo ethnography of
urban Native drinking, similarly casts Native sexuality as “aberrant” and violent. At the same
time, the Native men onscreen symbolically enact Mackenzie’s desires to abandon the
“confines” of white “middle class” erotic normativity. Mackenzie uses the phallic power of
settler cinema to culturally construct and discipline Native bodies while creating new visual texts
that can be added to signification chains of Indigenous abjection and imagining that he first
encountered in the colonial knowledge regimes of anthropology.

55. Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of the Indian Woman in American Vernacular
Culture.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 16, no. 4, Autumn 1975, pp. 698-674, 711.

56. Tommy’s Mexican/American identity is only revealed in the 2008, “press kit” Milestone Films, “The
Exiles Press Kit,” 6.

57. Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2004), 39-42.
Mo’e’hahne 172
Gendering Indigenous Futurity
Mackenzie represents Native women and men as having distinct temporal orientations
and, therefore, separate future destinations. Through the character Tommy (the
Mexican/American playing Indian), Mackenzie figures Indigenous men’s ambivalence towards
time. For instance, during the gas station scene, after Tommy chases Claudine into the
bathroom—and is unsuccessful at capturing the “squaw”—another one of his voice-overs begins:
So, that’s the way it is, just like a merry-go-round. Just wheeling and dealing, just going
around and around. You know your buddies you start drinking and the next thing you
know Monday rolls by and Tuesday and then I’m still going and it keeps going on from
day to day and months and before you know it maybe a year’s gone. And it’s still the
same. Just like when you go to jail it’s the same thing. When I’m in jail I don’t worry
about it because I can do time. Time is just time to me. I’m doing it outside so I can do it
inside.

For Tommy, days and months slip by through alcohol. Years of life are wasted but “it’s still the
same,” there’s no difference or progression with the movement of time. For Tommy, there’s no
qualitative or temporal difference between living his life incarcerated or on the “outside.”
Tommy’s life is so unlivable that incarceration does not worry him. Tommy “can do time,” “time
is just time,” and he’s doing time on the “outside;” so he can do time inside a cell. Mackenzie,
therefore, depicts Indigenous male futurity as bound to incarceration through the listless passing
of time. Such representations of Indigenous time contradict the lives of wage labor lead by many
Indigenous migrants to Yaanga during the period participated in. After all, Mackenzie filmed at
night because the Native cast worked during the day. Nevertheless, given the deep histories of
Indigenous carcerality and intoxication that have unfolded in occupied Yaanga, it is not
surprising that Mackenzie conjures Indigenous figurations that channel the logics of Indigenous
despondency and corporeal destruction—regimes that worked on the enslaved Indigenous body
until it was nearly obliterated from the spaces of Yaanga by the mid nineteenth century. The
Mo’e’hahne 173
sonics used in Tommy’s narration here were also taken from the same “interview” that
Mackenzie conducted while Tommy was “quite high” and repeatedly questioned. Like the Indian
laborers of the Los Angeles colony, trapped in carceral cycles of labor and compensation in
alcohol, Tommy was fed alcohol until he performed Mackenzie’s filmic desires. Both the
Indigenous people of the past and Tommy’s colonial present drink to escape, for they are “doing
time” regardless of whether they are working in the settler colonists’ fields or wandering the
streets of the settler city and being filmed. Through these figurations, Mackenzie ignores the
colonial violences, past and present, that structure male Indigenous lives and life chances.
Instead, for Mackenzie, the slippery temporalities of intoxication that Indigenous men create and
inhabit have no future destinations other than social death through incarceration.
In contrast to the way Mackenzie presents Native men, through Yvonne, the figure of the
Indigenous woman is represented as being concerned with reproductive futurity and the lives of
others. Yvonne’s pregnant body is noticeably visible throughout the film. In Yvonne’s narrative,
life and futurity are simultaneously symbolized by settler consumer economies and the figure of
the child. After the montage of still photographs that open the film, Mackenzie turns to the
fetishized consumer arcades of the downtown Grand Central Market where he visually
introduces Yvonne. After watching food vendors sell produce and fish in ethnographic splendor,
the camera pans up from a large automated mixing bowl to find Yvonne starring at the mixing
batter from behind the glass, holding a bag of groceries. Her voice-over begins:
I don’t know what to do sometimes. Now I’m having so much trouble. And sometimes I
feel that I’m happy where I’m at because I have that little baby coming and I’ve always
wanted a baby. At least I’m getting one thing that I always wanted, a child of my own…

Mo’e’hahne 174
For Yvonne, the figure of the unborn child represents hope through a not-yet-arrived temporality
and a potentially more a desirable life. The child’s potential birth and life has the power to justify
the suffering, confusion, and hardship that she endures as a dislocated urban Indigenous migrant.
Figure 3. Yvonne at the Grand Central Market, The Exiles (1961)

Yvonne walks through the market as her voiceover continues:
I don’t think I want to take the little baby back to San Carlos [her Arizona home
community]. I’d rather have him raised out here. I want him to speak English and try to
go to college and become something. I would like the baby to have the things I didn’t
have in my life…

Mackenzie visually pairs the last sonics of narration with footage of Yvonne looking at an
automated monkey toy on display in the market. The toy blows bubbles into Yvonne’s face and
she smiles.
Mo’e’hahne 175
For Yvonne, heterosexual reproductive futurity, through the figure of her unborn child, is
the only way that a desirable Indigenous life might be secured. She wants to raise the child in
Los Angeles where there is a chance that the child will learn English and attend college. Here,
Mackenzie’s Indian figurations at once potentially reflect the realities of Indigenous life while
also working to further repressive colonial, patriarchal ideologies. Yvonne’s affective and
corporeal investments in futurity (in the form of her pregnant body) posit that the only way her
subjected female Indigenous life is made livable is through the hope that her child might have the
“things” that she did not. This future, however, is not guaranteed. Furthermore, in the world of
The Exiles, the figure of the unborn Native child is always cathected to objects or spaces of
settler-colonial consumption. In this way, participating in the colonial political economy that has
arisen atop of and displaced Yaanga is symbolically the only (other) way to secure a future in the
Los Angeles settler colony. Mackenzie’s representation of Yvonne resembles Lee Edelman’s
theorizations of the affective investments in the figure of the not-yet-arrived child that subjects
are coerced into making through the normative disciplining logics of reproductive futurity.
Reproductive futurity names the biopolitical and ideological forms of reproduction carried out in
order to secure a future (relations of colonial reproduction that I examine further chapter four).
58

In this way, Mackenzie’s representation of Yvonne portrays Indigenous women as only
possessing potential biopolitical value and, therefore, futurity if they reproduce. For example,
Mary and Claudine’s temporalities are depicted similarly to the men, like Tommy, who drink and
are “just doing time.” In this way, Indigenous women only have a future if they become mothers.

58. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004),
24-25.

Mo’e’hahne 176
Through Yvonne, Mackenzie further maps urban space and urban life as possessing more
opportunities for Native people than the desolate lives that are lived in the spaces of the
reservation. For instance, Mackenzie writes that the market scene was added late in the project.
Mackenzie “took advantage of the [market] location [in order] to show something about
[Yvonne] as a person and about the contrast of the city with the old Indian traditions and pastoral
life.” The images of consumerism and spectatorship served duel purposes for Mackenzie, they
define Yvonne’s character and contrast city life with his imagined notion of “old Indian
traditions.” Through this configuration of “repressive authenticity” Mackenzie casts an imagined
pastoral life as a truly Indigenous while urban lives that entail participating in the settler political
economy are de-indigenizing.
59

After purchasing food, Yvonne returns to the apartment that she shares with Homer.
Homer and another man are in the living room reading as the radio plays. They do not
acknowledge her as she enters. Yvonne walks into the kitchen and starts to perform what
sociologists call “reproductive labor,” the “the domestic” labor of cooking and cleaning which
enable others in the “household,” normatively masculine subjects, to live and work as wage
laborers outside of the home.
60
Reproductive labor also includes childcare. During the scene, a
song by Charlie Wright plays on the radio; the chorus sings “the good times, the bad times.” The
song helps to set the dreary affective tone of the scene and foreshadows Yvonne’s voiceover.
The camera moves to frame Yvonne stirring a pot. She watches Homer from the kitchen as he
returns to the living room after taking cigarettes from a man that was asleep in the bedroom. Her
voice-over resumes:

59. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 180-183.

60. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division
of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 18.1 (1992):1-43.
Mo’e’hahne 177
I don’t see much of him. When he’s home I feel alright. I’m hoping and wishing all the
time that he will straighten up. If I hadn’t met him I probably would have been alright
now maybe had what I wanted. I’ve tried to be a good wife. I did everything I thought
would satisfy him like cooking for him when he comes home and I iron his clothes. I
always have his clothes ready in case he wants to go someplace.

Yvonne complains that she does not see Homer often. Her negative affects are temporarily
ameliorated when he is around. Her life is further disciplined by the norms of heterosexual
coupling as she strives to be “a good wife” and perform all the required reproductive labor of the
house to satisfy her onscreen partner. Yvonne labors to support Homer’s life of leisure, reading,
eating, drinking, and playing cards; these are the only representations of Homer Mackenzie
creates as work is omitted. Through the figure of Yvonne, Mackenzie further represents
Indigenous people as failing subjects in urban settler modernity. They fail to live up the norms of
hetero/sexual domesticity and normative coupling, represented by Yvonne and Homer’s
relationship. Yvonne tries her best and hopes Homer will “straighten up.” Through their
relationship, Mackenzie further emphasizes Indigenous men’s unproductive position in the
colonial order. They do not perform wage labor and only survive through the labors of Native
women. Emphasizing his own gendered subjectivity, Mackenzie admits a gendered bias towards
what he perceived as the plight of Native women and white colonial patriarchal methods of
representing Indigenous women: “As a man I tended to be much more realistic about Tommy
and Homer and somewhat sentimental about poor little Yvonne” (emphasis added).
61

Through Mary, Claudine, and “poor littler Yvonne,” Mackenzie figures Indigenous
women as victims and Indigenous men as bound for social death. The phantasmic figurations of
Tommy and Yvonne, which are first animated by Mackenzie’s prying interview questions (taken
from yet another temporality and then paired with moving images that he created later) further

61. Mackenzie, A Description and Examination, 47.

Mo’e’hahne 178
represent Indigenous life as unfolding through slippery and non-normative temporalities. Such
configurations of time are similar to the “queer temporalities” theorized by Elizabeth Freeman,
which have the counter hegemonic potentials to blur and transcend a normative telos.
62
However,
the Indigenous temporalities that Mackenzie enacts are positioned in relation to the disciplinarily
logics of heterosexual reproduction (Yvonne’s life) or the necropolitical exclusions from settler
bios through social death (Tommy’s life) in order to queer Indigenous subjects as the abjected
constitutive outside of the settler colonial bios, polis, and telos in relation to white settler
normativity. Reproduction and social death remain the events that anchor Indigenous lives that
inhabit a queered and denigrated temporality. As time passes Indigenous subjects by, they fill
their days drinking, shopping, or hoping.

The Queerness of Indian Hating
Mackenzie’s contradictory mode of figuring Native sexuality through relations of
scopophilic pleasure and Indigenous “aberration” are most clear in one of the most fascinating
scenes in the film in which, towards the end of the evening, Homer travels to his regular bar
alone. The sequence is punctuated by figures of colonial governmentality, embodied by white
male police officers. Homer sits with his male friends in a parked car outside the bar drinking
and watching the white police officers move through the public spaces. When the police officers
exit the bar, Homer leaves his friends and ventures into the raucous space. Homer orders a drink
and sits alone at a booth. He drinks and looks with a blank expression at the room full of life and
movement. The bar is filled with the working class, multiracial and racially ambiguous Main
Street crowd. The scene is sonically dominated by the score, with flutters of background noise

62. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds.
Mo’e’hahne 179
and inaudible conversation. Mackenzie cuts between Homer drinking and close-ups of the crowd
as they talk and drink. Homer is figured as the lone, passive Indian observer who is within and
yet separated from the settler metropolis he observes—in the words of Mackenzie, “looking out
at a world he couldn’t quite comprehend.” Then the camera, simulating Homer’s gaze, becomes
fixated on two men at the bar. A white man, smiling, lifts a glass to the lips of an Asian man.
They laugh and embrace—the white man gestures as he speaks. The music becomes more
rhythmic with pulsing drums, horns, and guitars. The energy of the scene begins to build. The
two men move to the center of the room and start to dance.

Figure 4. Homer watching the room and the dancing men, The Exiles (1961)

Mo’e’hahne 180
Figure 5. Dancing men at the bar, The Exiles (1961)

They sway, trading glances with one another as well as the other men who stand and look on.
Homer is shown looking away peeling the label off a beer bottle. The camera focuses on the
men’s legs as they dance, their bodies intertwined. Back at the bar, the men laugh and hold one
another but Mackenzie cuts away just as they appear to move closer for a kiss. In this detour into
public queer pleasures and socialities, the camera simultaneously embodies Mackenzie’s
scopophilic gaze and Homer’s perspective as he watches the erotic play. The camera’s point of
view itself enacts Mackenzie’s appropriation of the Indian. The Indigenous is represented as
observing the interracial homoerotics with curiosity and then boredom. However, the auteur that
set out to document the Indian’s “inner emotional patterns “cannot look away from the dancing
interracial couple.
“There was also some question over the appropriateness to a film about Indians of the two
non-Indian homosexuals dancing in the bar,” wrote Mackenzie. However, he continues: [s]ince
Mo’e’hahne 181
these two were indigenous to this area of Main Street, and as this film was supposed to be about
life which does not seem to fit people into such handy categories as ‘homosexual’ or ‘Indians,’
we decided to include them” [emphasis added].
63
Here, Mackenzie figures the non-native and
queer subjects of Main Street as the true Indigenous people of Yaanga, while the exiled Indian
observer sits watching, out of place. Queer colonizing socialities are, therefore, indigenized and
the Indigenous people are replaced. Mackenzie effectively queers Indigenous people through his
eliminatory and amalgamatory slippages between the categories homosexual and Indian. Native
people are de-indigenized through this configuration of settler-colonial sexuality where non-
normativity is equated with Indianness, thereby expanding the rubrics of indigeneity and thus
who can lay claim to the occupied spaces of Yaanga. For Mackenzie, as for many other settler
artists, activists, and scholars, Indianness, as Jodi Byrd writes, becomes a site of transit for “the
non-normative, queered lives that cross gender [and sexual] boundaries and borders.”
64
Settling
subjects read Indigenous sexualities as always already ‘queer’ not because they grasp the violent
ways that settler colonialism attempts to regulate and abject Indigenous socialities, but rather
because they apprehend Indianness as an escapist line of flight which allows them to channel
their various affective desires. Reading white queer Indian play and sexual modernities, Scott
Lauria Morgensen argues that “[i]mpersonating indigeneity and believing in colonial modernity
are noncontradictory acts, given that settlers preserve Native authenticity as a history they must
possess in order to transcend it.”
65
Mackenzie transited the Indian in order to filmically tour the
homoerotic spaces of Main Street thereby arriving at a figuration of Indigeneity where the bi-

63. Ibid., 98-99.

64. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 34.

65. Morgensen, Spaces Between Us, 17-18.
Mo’e’hahne 182
racial queer couple become the true Indigenous peoples of Los Angeles. Mackenzie, therefore,
reconfigures and extends the hetero/sexual, multiracial regimes of settler colonial sexuality, that
were inaugurated by the Spanish crown in 1781 in order to possess and repopulate Yaanga, to
include the urban homo/sexualities of mid-twentieth century Main Street.
After the sequence of multiracial erotics, Mackenzie returns to the tropes of white
colonial governmentality, hetero/sexual desire, and gendered male violence—perhaps to
narratively justify the queer detour. Homer knocks a beer bottle onto the floor. It shatters
and catches his friend Rico’s attention, who then walks over. “What’s a matter Homer?”
he asks. “Ain’t nothing wrong, man,” Homer replies. Rico tries to persuade Homer to go
to another bar to look for “some chicks.” The loud laugh of the queer white man at the
bar strangely continues to cut through the scene. “If that stud don’t shut up, I’m gonna
bust him up,” Homer says. He walks to the bar and starts a fight with another Indian
man—a man we are supposed to believe he is not friendly with. Rico leaves Homer to
fight, not wanting to “get busted.”
If Mackenzie represents Native men as passive observers of the multiracial
homoerotics—who become the true Indigenous people of downtown—he figures Native
women as retreating to homosocial domestic spaces in order to escape the gendered
violence of Indigenous heterosexuality. While the men are out drinking Yvonne shares
moments of intimacy and tenderness with a female Native friend as they prepare for bed.
In their sleepwear, they chat and look at photos of loved ones. The women’s energy
hovers between the platonic and erotic as they share the intimacy and comfort of
Yvonne’s bedroom.

Mo’e’hahne 183
Figure 6. Yvonne in bed with her companion, The Exiles (1961)

Mackenzie figures Indigenous female homo-domesticity as a site of refuge from the
worlds of consumption, alcohol, and violence. For instance, after Homer leaves the bar,
the film culminates in a scene where the group of friends (Tommy, Claudine, Cliff and
the others) are partying on top of hill overlooking downtown. The men play a drum, sing,
dance, and drink. Tommy later forces himself onto Claudine, ripping her clothes. When
she resists, Tommy beats her while Homer watches. The night soon devolves into a brawl
between all the men.
66
Everyone wakes up the next morning in their cars on top of the hill

66. According to Mackenzie, final dance and brawl was one of the real fights that erupted on set, which he
describes as “almost another Custer’s Last Stand…If it hadn’t been for the efforts of the principal cast members,
there probably would have been another historic disaster for the palefaces.” Mackenzie, A Description and
Examination, 52.

Mo’e’hahne 184
overlooking downtown. They walk through the streets of Bunker Hill while Yvonne is
shown waking up next to her female companion.
Figure 7. Yvonne asleep with her companion in the morning, The Exiles (1961)
She looks out to window to find Cliff, Homer, and Claudine walking arm and arm down
the street, presumably heading to the bar to repeat the cycle. Framed by the tenements of
Bunker Hill, the group walks down the street towards an uncertain/no future, while
Yvonne is momentarily safe in the queer Indigenous space of her bedroom.
67

67. A still from scene of the group walking towards a future of urban abjection becomes the closing shot as
well as the film’s poster.
Mo’e’hahne 185
Figure 8. Closing shot, The Exiles (1961)

This closing sequence represents Yvonne in contrast to most of her screen time
throughout the film, where she is depicted as trapped in the regimes of settler
consumption, migration, and heterosexual coupling. She watches Homer, Claudine, Cliff,
Mary, and Tommy walk towards an uncertain future and then returns to bed with her
female companion. Yvonne emerges as a figure of what Gerald Vizenor calls
“survivance.” She becomes an “active presence” in the film that “repudiates” narratives
of “dominance, tragedy, and victimry.”
68
As an Indigenous presence, her futurity is

68. Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American States of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1998),15.

Mo’e’hahne 186
cathected to the both the figure of the unborn child and to queer Indigenous affiliations.
Yvonne’s filmic life, as Lisa Tatonetti suggests, represents the possibility that a “queer
erotic can intervene in the cycles of colonial violence that continue to circulate in
Indigenous communities.”
69
However, Yvonne’s embodied futurity also transcends the
filmic spaces of The Exiles and signifies the horizons of Indigenous life disciplined by
settler colonial necropower.

Representational Violence and its Affects
Nearly fifty years later, when the film was released onto DVD, NPR interviewed Yvonne
Williams Walker, who played the lead and still lives in the vicinity of Yaanga.
70
The interview
reveals an experience and reading of the film that vastly differs from Mackenzie’s. Williams
Walker explained to the interviewer, Michele Martin, that she was working as a housekeeper
around the same time that Mackenzie met the male cast members. Cliff, one of the men
Mackenzie asked to be in the film was Williams Walker’s partner at the time. However, Cliff
was replaced by Homer “because the boss wouldn’t let Cliff off”. Throughout the interview,
Williams Walker expressed ambivalence about taking part in the film. When Martin asked why
she agreed to be in the film, she responded, “I knew it wouldn’t become nothing…they liked it,
the other guys, and so I said, okay…I’ll help out”. Martin then goes on to inquire about Williams
Walker’s pregnancy during the film:
Martin: Were you really pregnant…how did that go?
Williams Walker quickly responded: Oh, he just died a couple of years ago.
Martin: Oh, I’m sorry. What did he die of?
Williams Walker: He died of diabetic. He was a diabetic. Cliff was a diabetic too, and he

69. Lisa Tatonetti, The Queerness of Native American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2014), 143.

70. National Public Radio. “‘The Exiles’ Portrays Woman's Real-Life Struggle.”
Mo’e’hahne 187
passed away, too.

To the interviewer’s surprise, premature death haunts her Indigenous life off-screen—a life that
is forever bound to Mackenzie’s texts of Indian play and abjection. Williams Walker outlived the
child whose futurity she had hoped would make her life in occupied Yaanga bearable and who
she wished would be able to enjoy the things she did have in her life. Through their exposure to
premature death, what Ruth Wilson Gilmore theorizes as a characteristic of racial necropolitics,
Indigenous bodies as well as the lives of the future generations experience a liminal futurity.
71

This liminality can be read as no future, for in the case of William Walker, she outlived her child
born in occupied Yaanga. Through Mackenzie’s decision to orient Yvonne’s narrative towards
the figure of the child to come, Indigenous death and a foreclosed futurity forever haunt the
cultural after/life of the film.
Martin asked Williams Walker if she ever saw the completed film and if so what she
thought of it? Williams Walker replied in a reserved tone: “I really didn’t care. It just made, it
[made] me feel a little bad because my kids. I really don't want them to see it, but they’re going
to wind up seeing it because my oldest girl saw it. And she’d be kind of…you know, like she
didn’t like it.” For Williams Walker, the film was a source of shame and negative affects for her
family, something she sought unsuccessfully to hide from her children. She admits that one of
her daughters saw the film and was upset by it. Martin continued to press Williams Walker on
why she did not want her children to see the film. As a participant and an Indigenous viewer,
Williams Walker expressed shame about having participated in The Exiles, explaining that she

71. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and
exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political
geographies.” While Gilmore does not theorize the settler colonization of Indigenous peoples, the production of
categories of being/peoplehood through differentiated spatial practices can characterize the assaults on Indigenous
life. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in eds. R. J. Johnston, Peter J. Taylor, and Michael J. Watts,
Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 261.
Mo’e’hahne 188
did not feel that she had accomplished anything by being in it. Williams Walker did not like the
way “her story” was told. The circulations of negative affect produced by Mackenzie’s text
create troubled affective economies that followed Williams Walker and her family through time.
When Martin brought up representations of drinking Williams Walker responded, “I don't
know. I guess people have fun drinking like that and go crazy, but I never was into it.” Contrary
to Mackenzie’s exilic Indigenous figurations, Williams Walker worked full time, raised a family,
and visited her reservation community every summer when she first migrated to Yaanga.
Williams Walker said people tried their best to make something out of the film but in the end,
she “just didn’t care for it, really.” For her, the film presents a narrow and negative depiction of
Indian life through a narrative that the Native cast had little part in crafting. It is a narrative that
abounds with negative affects for Indigenous people as participants, relatives, and viewers.

Conclusion
Mackenzie went Native in the urban, occupied spaces of Yaanga to escape his
heteronormative, middle class, white masculinity. Mackenzie sought to channel his negative
affects surrounding ongoing settler-state violence against Indigenous people as well as his
anxieties about sexuality through practices of Indigenous figuration and filmic capture. Through
his filmic practice, Mackenzie created the relations of Indigenous labor and alcohol that worked
Indigenous bodies to death in the Los Angeles colony of the nineteenth century. Through his
embodied and filmic forms of Indian play, Mackenzie also sought to position himself, through
what Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak identifies, as both the “white man” who “saves the brown
Mo’e’hahne 189
(Native) woman” from the Native man by representing her struggles.
72
Michelle Raheja also
observes that, “[t]he plotlines of most westerns feature Native Americans living outside of their
historical, geographical, and cultural context, situated in the past with no viable future.”
73
The
Exiles recreates the settler spatial and temporal tropes of the genre Western by locating the
failing Indigenous subject outside of the normatively mapped Indigenous spaces of
rural/reservation locales and placing them in what Mackenzie represents as the harsh urban
modernity in which they are ill-equipped to survive. The Exiles is a scopophilic record of
Mackenzie’s colonial ambivalence wherein the Indigenous migrants to Yaanga are spatially and
temporally misplaced and displaced as “aberrations”
74
with “no viable future.” For at the end of
his ethnographic journey Mackenzie remarked, “I had been living with the Indians so long that I
was beginning to dislike them.” The Exiles represents Mackenzie’s complex affective
orientations towards Indigenous people.
75
Having been elevated to the level of public culture, the
film also exists as a public pedagogical text. Mackenzie’s Indian imaginings and filmic
animations, therefore, serve to instruct viewing publics as to the character and nature of
Indigenous life.

72. Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillian Education, 1988:271-313, 295-296.

73. Raheja, Reservation Realism, x.

74. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black.

75. Mackenzie, A Description and Examination, 85.

Mo’e’hahne 190
Chapter Three:
Corporeal Consumption and the Everyday Violence of Indigenous Figuration:
“Uncle Yu Indian Theme Restaurant”

“When the world’s great food cities are being discussed, Paris and Tokyo and Taipei and
Rome, it would not be unreasonable to include among them . . . San Gabriel, Calif., population
30,072,” wrote Jonathan Gold, the white, male Los Angeles-based food writer, and Laurie
Ochoa, his Mexican/American partner and frequent collaborator in 1992. They continue, “What
Monterey Park was to the ’80s, San Gabriel is to the ’90s, the white-hot center of Chinese food in
America, but this time mostly fueled by Taiwanese energy rather than capital from Hong Kong.
In Taipei, San Gabriel is almost as famous as Hollywood or Disneyland.”
1
For Gold and Ochoa,
who have lauded the Asian/American food cultures of San Gabriel, California for decades, the
city has become the center of global Chinese cooking. Since the nineteen seventies, the suburban
spaces of the San Gabriel Valley have undergone drastic necropolitical and political economic
transformations, having been repopulated by waves of upwardly mobile, transnational migrants
from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The San Gabriel Valley has become a collection of what
geographer Wei Li calls “ethnoburbs,” suburban geographies dominated by non-white ethnic
communities, in this case, East Asian migrants, largely of Chinese origin. According to Li, the
San Gabriel Valley has become a “global economic outpost” for circuits of Chinese and
Taiwanese capital and constitutes the largest Chinese political economy in North America.
2
One

1. Jonathan Gold and Laurie Ochoa 1992 “Cooks’ Walks, The Great Mall of China Series,” Los Angeles
Times 12 November, 11.

2. These spaces have been/are occupied by settler and migrant Mexican/American communities and
Asian/Americans and Latinx/American and that moved east of Los Angeles’s urban core with the easing of
residential segregation.
Mo’e’hahne 191
of the most visible and celebrated segments of this Chinese/American political economy is the
food industry. In Los Angeles public culture, the San Gabriel Valley has become cathected to
embodied and affective pleasures of consumption, giving rise to novel forms of settler-colonial
fetishization through gastronomy, as evidenced by the writings of Gold and Ochoa. In this
chapter, I consider the spaces of “Uncle Yu Indian Themed Restaurant,” a Taiwanese/American
restaurant located in San Gabriel, California. Uncle Yu Indian does not serve “American Indian”
cuisine, rather it occupies the genre of the light-night Taiwanese themed pub and it abounds with
Indigenous figurations. Themed restaurants can be found throughout the food cultures of Taiwan,
East Asia, and what Shu-mei Shih calls the “Sinophone”
3
(Chinese speaking) world more
broadly. The genre is also emergent in the globally oriented and settler-colonized spaces of the
San Gabriel Valley.
Jonathan Gold has become famous for, in his words, “working [his] way through the
trenches of ethnic cooking in Los Angeles.” The Pulitzer Prize winning critic has made a career
of introducing the culinary ethnic “minor literatures” of the settler-colonial metropolis to the
polyracial publics of Los Angeles. Gold’s writings, which resemble popular culinary
anthropology, represent some of the ways that the occupied and remade Gabrielino-Tongva
homelands have been imagined, engaged, and transited in public Los Angeles settler culture.
Describing the spaces of San Gabriel, California, Gold and Ochoa write that “[o]n a warm night
the red and green restaurant signs seem to glow like the lights of ships in the harbor, and wide
walkways fill with contented Chinese windowshoppers [sic] who have just eaten well.” For Gold
and Ochoa, the food filled suburban shopping center becomes a harbor that channels imaginary

3. Shu-mei, Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2007); Shu-mei Shih, “Introduction What Is Sinophone Studies?” in eds. Shu-mei Shih, Chien-
hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
Mo’e’hahne 192
ships of Chinese settlers and interloping colonists into the settler sea of lights and “well
manicured parking lots.”
4
Gold writes that the “ethnic” food cultures he “documents” constitute
the Real Los Angeles, as migrants “make their way into the country” and bring their culinary
cultures with them.
5
As structures of feeling, culinary praxes are ways that migrants and colonial
settlers work to affectively and socially recreate the feelings and spaces of home atop of
occupied, Indigenous homelands in the Los Angeles settler colony. Identifying the temporal and
spatial potential of the ethnic restaurant, Gold writes that “the most authentic Los Angeles
experiences tend to involve a mild sense of dislocation, of tripping into a rabbit hole and popping
up in some wholly unexpected location” [emphasis added]. Gold continues, “The greatest Los
Angeles cooking, has first a sense of wonder about it, and only then a sense of place, because the
place it has a sense of is likely to be somewhere else entirely.”
6
The indigenizing praxes of the
ethnic restaurant engender temporal and cultural collisions that settler subjects like Gold, and
perhaps the migrant communities themselves, seek to consume. The affective and material spaces
created by the (ethnic) colonial food cultures of Los Angeles, therefore, represent distinct settler
colonial place-making praxes that symbolically work to transport visitors to alternative spaces
and times. As a material form, the ethnic restaurant acquiesces to and benefits from the
colonization and commodification of Indigenous lands. Through Gold’s venerating formulations,
the ethnic restaurant becomes the ultimate spatial and cultural embodiment of what I call settler

4. Gold and Ochoa, “Cooks’ Walks”; Jonathan Gold Counter Intelligence: Where to East in the Real Los
Angeles (Los Angeles: LA Weekly Books, 2000) vi.

5. In 1992, mirroring how the multiethnic and multiracial communities have been theorized in leftist
knowledge production, Gold and Ochoa declared strip of Las Tunes Boulevard, located several blocks away from
Mission San Gabriel, the “neighborhood of the future,” because of the free play of Asian/American gastronomy,
Mexican/American eateries, and disappearing white suburban businesses. Jonathan Gold and Laurie Ochoa 1992,
“Las Tunas: The Neighborhood of the Future” Los Angeles Times 12 March, 18.

6. Gold, Counter Intelligence, vi-vi.
Mo’e’hahne 193
Americana: forms that pedagogically communicate specifically settler-colonial ideologies of
domination and Indigenous abjection through the practices of everyday American culture, such
as the forms of Indian imagining that pervade American consumer-object economies. Such
possessive consumer Indian objects include “Winnebago” recreation vehicles, the “Jeep Grand
Cherokee,” and sports franchise economies such as the Washington “Redskins,” and Chicago
“Blackhawks,” and their commodified Indian iconographies.
The presence of Indigenous figures in an ethnic restaurant might appear on the surface as
what Philip Deloria calls an “anomaly.”
7
However, as Gold writes, the cultural power of the
restaurant can transport visitors to “unexpected” Symbolic and Real locations, in the Lacaian
sense. In Indians in Expected Places, Philip Deloria argues that the dialectic between anomaly
and expectation work to discipline normative Euroamerican cultural conceptions of the
possibilities for Indigenous life, and I would add, the possibilities for Indigenous signification.
By analyzing forms that, on the surface, might appear as an anomaly, such as an “Indian” themed
Taiwanese/American restaurant, as Deloria illustrates, can, in fact, reveal cultural patterns and
histories that often go unacknowledged in normative narrations of colonial culture and Los
Angeles settler colonialism.
8
Read in the multiracial context of the San Gabriel Valley, spaces
where non-indigenous and non-white colonizing bios and polis and their spatial significations
have become hegemonic, Indians, imagined or otherwise, are not expected. In this chapter,
however, I posit that the appearance of Indigenous figurations in global Sinophone consumer
cultures are, in fact, expected in the context of Los Angeles settler colonialism because

7. Philip Deloria, Indian in Unexpected Places, 2.

8. Ibid, 2-6.

Mo’e’hahne 194
formations of Indigenous abjection are ideologically and materially integral to reproducing the
colonial order.
The San Gabriel Valley has been home to the Gabrielino-Tongva since time immemorial.
These homelands, like all spaces of the Yaanga region, have been continually remapped and
occupied by settler-colonizing cultures. First, they were made to spatially signify the multiracial
pioneering settlers of the eighteenth century, then the entrenched Mexican settler bios, and by the
mid twentieth century white suburban Americana. Today, there is a what Jodi Byrd calls a
“cacophony” of colonial racial and ethnic articulations that seek to lay claim to the lands and
resignify them through tropes of racial diversity. Since the nineteen seventies, the racial and
ethnic demographics of the West San Gabriel Valley have shifted from a white majority to an
Asian/American and Latinx majority, with a white minority. The repopulation of these white
suburban spaces took shape in the wake of the easing of racially restrictive Los Angeles
suburban housing practices beginning in the nineteen fifties. Whereas shift in US immigration
policy of the nineteen sixties increased the transnational setter-colonial migrations from East and
Southeast Asian to the Yaanga region. Due to the easing of restrictive racial housing covenants,
moderate-income US born Japanese/Americans and Mexican/Americans began moving to the
white suburbs east of downtown Los Angeles like Monterey Park. By the late nineteen seventies,
in response to the changing US migration policy, migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan began
moving directly to the San Gabriel Valley and bypassing the experiences of life in urban slums
and the urban core. By the nineteen eighties, the city of Monterey Park, became the first city in
the North American US settler colony (that is, excluding Hawaiʻi) with a majority
Asian/American population. Following the paths and patterns of life and settlement established
by white urban to suburban migration beginning in the mid twentieth century, these non-white,
Mo’e’hahne 195
transnational and urban to suburban settler-migrants were directed towards middle-income
spaces and homes by transnational formations of capitalism and US settler-colonial capitalism.
Desires for life, familial reproduction, material comfort, and private property thus cohere as
orientations towards the already occupied Indigenous homelands of settler suburbia. These
orientations towards possession and life (as colonizing bios) become possibilities within the Los
Angeles settler political, necropolitical, and spatial economies of suburbanization. (I explore
these regimes of necropolitics and settler sexuality further in chapter four.)
As a result of these necropolitical and spatial transformations, Sinophone (origin) settler
colonialisms have engulfed and resignified the occupied Gabrielino-Tongva homelands of
Yaanga and the San Gabriel Valley. For instance, according to Wei Li, global Sinophone
cultures first remapped “the greater Los Angeles region” as Luo Sheng, “Los Province.” Later
Monterey Park, California was marketed in terms of real-estate as Meng Shi, “Mon City,” to the
transnational settler subjects. Meng Shi became ground zero for late-twentieth-century
Chinese/American and Taiwanese/American migrations to the US North American settler
colony.
9
This biopolitical transformation has also produced a massive and transnational
Asian/American “ethnic” economy, described at the begging of this chapter, that, in part,
animates the commodified practices of Uncle Yu Indian. In what follows, I explore how Uncle
Yu Indian Theme Restaurant is an exemplar of settler common sense cultural practices.

9. Li Ethnoburb, 90, 148. These colonial remapping practices are part of the long arc of nearly two
centuries of Chinese speaking settler colonialism and colonial sojourning in the Americas. For example, Cantonese
speaking settlers during the nineteenth century referred to North and South American in general and the California
colonies, in particular, as Guam Sam: the Golden Mountain. Guam Sam/the Americas were the spaces where riches
could be obtained, either in the form of currency or the gold extracted from the Indigenous homelands of Northern
California that were cleared through US militia and settler state genocidal head hunting campaigns. For instance, see
Henry Yu, “The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific,” in Donna R. Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder eds.,
Connecting Seas and Connecting Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations
from the 1830s to the 1930s. Lieden: Brill, 2011.

Mo’e’hahne 196

“Pocahontas and Yosemite Sam Built a Restaurant...and the People Came”
“Authentic Taiwanese food is so plentiful in the San Gabriel Valley that
immigrants from that culinarily [sic] rich island hardly have a chance to feel homesick,”
wrote journalist Cindy Chang in a 2006 review of Uncle Yu Indian Theme Restaurant for
the Los Angeles Times. However, Chang continues, “[w]hat the Sinicized parts of the
Valley have always lacked is [a] night life reminiscent of Taipei’s rollicking basement
jazz hangouts, bass-thumping dance clubs and country-style pubs.”
10
According to
Chang, Uncle Yu Indian Theme Restaurant fills that cultural void in the San Gabriel
Valley. The circulation of the restaurant in the public digital cultural spaces of Los
Angeles offer a unique glimpse into how the spaces of the restaurant are apprehended and
resignified by consuming settler publics. The restaurant is located in a strip mall that is
shared by a few other Asian/American ethnic businesses on San Gabriel Boulevard,
roughly a mile east of the Mission San Gabriel. The restaurant is mere blocks away from
the “neighborhood of the future” and parking lots of “ships” that Jonathan Gold and
Laurie Ochao fetishized and imagined in the early nineteen-nineties. Uncle Yu Indian is
also approximately a mile north of a large corridor of Chinese/American and
Taiwanese/American businesses along Valley Boulevard in the city San Gabriel,
California known as the “Golden Mile.”
11
Despite these thriving political economies,
Wendy Cheng writes that that Asian/American residents of San Gabriel, California

10. Cindy Chang, “Taste of Taipei for the after-midnight crowd,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2006.

11. Wendy Cheng, The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Mo’e’hahne 197
experience persistent political exclusion from the white and Mexican/American
municipal government (relations of biopolitics and the political economy I engage further
in chapter four).
12

Uncle Yu Indian reflects a growing global trend of themed restaurants throughout
East Asia, examples include Hello Kitty, Barbie, hospital, and cannibal themed
restaurants. Taiwanese themed restaurants are also becoming more common in the San
Gabriel Valley, examples include Jurassic Restaurant, a pub that features dinosaur
skeletons and waitresses whose revealing uniforms resemble cavewomen-Native hybrids.
A Taiwanese/American entrepreneur also opened Magic Restroom Café, where patrons
both sit on toilets and are served in toilet dishes.
13
According to Cindy Chang, the owners
of Uncle Yu Indian, Su Yu Feng Yu and her spouse, Wen Tiung Yu, however, “modeled
[their restaurant] after a Taipei pub of the same name, with similar Native American
tchotchkes.”
14
The appropriation of imagined American Indians by Taiwanese publics is,
therefore, a transnational, commercial cultural form.

Uncle Yu Indian has a log-cabin interior décor with large wooden tables, faux
trees, and numerous “Indian” decorations that are interspersed with panels of flat-screen
TVs. The restaurant features an all-female Asian/American wait staff that wears a

12. Wendy Cheng has analyzed these formation, see Cheng, The Changs Next Door to the Díazes, 129-170.

13. Both Jurassic and the Magic Restroom Cafe are located in the City of Industry, a small municipality in
a cluster of ethnoburbs with large Asian/American populations further east of Los Angeles in the south San Gabriel
Valley. There are over a dozen similar restroom themed eateries in Taiwan. Clarissa Wei, “Toilet bowls galore:
Magic Restroom Cafe opens in city of Industry,” Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2013, accessed November 15,
2013, http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-magic-restroom-cafe-opens-in-city-of-industry-
20131014,0,649204.story#ixzz2lUriFMTK.

14. Cindy Chang, “Taste of Taipei for the after-midnight crowd,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2006.

Mo’e’hahne 198
revealing uniform intended to make them look like “Indians.” As such, Uncle Yu Indian
has been referred to as the “Taiwanese Hooters” in Los Angeles public culture.
Anticipating both Chinese speaking and non-Chinese speaking publics, Uncle Yu
Indian’s menu is in Chinese and English. The wait staff is also bilingual.
15
When the
restaurant opened in 2005, it was simply called “Indian.” The restaurant’s sign featured a
headshot of a stereotypical Plains Indian man, donning a stoic grimace and wearing an
eagle-feather headdress. The figure was accompanied by the word “Indian” (in the
restaurant’s stylized typography). However, the restaurant was soon rebranded as “Uncle
Yu Indian Theme Restaurant” and the owners replaced the head-dressed figure with an
animated, jovial likeness of the co-owner “Uncle Yu,” smiling with his thumbs up.
16
The
name and image change could be a gesture to present the restaurant as more politically
correct to possible discerning publics, but without compromising the Indian theme and
Indian branding already at work.
Echoing Chang’s review in the Los Angeles Times, the restaurant has received generally
positive reviews from local publications and social media. In 2011, Uncle Yu Indian was named
“best Taiwanese-Themed Sports Bar” by LA Weekly. The reviewer writes, “[w]hat's in a name?
In the case of Uncle Yu's Indian Theme Restaurant, everything and nothing. Waitresses clad in
red tank tops [and] black shorts…sporting a feather in their hair, cheerfully greet you in
Mandarin upon entry at the place nicknamed ‘the Taiwanese Hooters.’”
17
That same year Uncle

15. Chang, “Taste of Taipei for the after-midnight crowd.”

16. The words “Uncle Yu” are written below the restaurant’s new spokesperson, and the former branded
text “Indian” is complemented with the new qualifying description of “Theme Restaurant.”

17. Jim Thurmon, “Best Taiwanese-Themed Sports Bar – 2011 Uncle Yu's Indian Theme Restaurant,” LA
Weekly, 2011, accessed November 1, 2013, http://www.laweekly.com/bestof/2011/award/best-taiwanese-themed-
sports-bar-1509805/.
Mo’e’hahne 199
Yu Indian made CBS Los Angeles’s list of the “Best Taiwanese Food in the San Gabriel Valley”
(along with Din Tai Fung of Arcadia, California and Happy Garden of Alhambra, California).
18

Another reviewer ethnographically rendered the restaurant: “Scantily-clad waitresses in
moccasins and feathered headdresses scramble between communal, rustic, wood tables
surrounded by faux-timbered walls, adorned with buffalo heads and raccoon pelts.” Through a
figuration of heterosexual reproduction that imagines Indigenous women as sexually available to
the white male settler (a figuration I analyze later), another reviewer declared, “Pocahontas and
Yosemite Sam Built a Restaurant...and the People Came.”
19
The figure of the Indigenous woman
is imagined by food writers through the character Pocahontas or identified through other epithets
such as “squaws” and “Asian Pocahontas.” The sexualized abjection of Indigenous women
through the Indian-playing wait staff is found in the commentary of various colonial, dinning
publics.
20

Not all visitors, however, enjoy the décor or the Indian-playing wait staff. For instance, a
Yelp.com reviewer offered a pointed critique of the restaurant’s Indian aesthetic with an
attention to global forms colonization and Indigenous dispossession by comparing US and
Taiwanese settler colonialism:
Awesome concept! But throw in oppressive imagery appropriating from a group of
indigenous people that have been historically decimated and continue to be marginalized?

18. “Best Taiwanese Restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley,” CBS Los Angeles, August 4, 2011, accessed
November 13, 2013, http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/guide/best-taiwanese-restaurants-in-the-san-gabriel-valley/.

19. Brab Crouch, “Pocahontas and Yosemite Sam Built a Restaurant...and the People Came,”
Examiner.com, September 21, 2011, accessed November 1, 2013, http://www.examiner.com/article/pocahontas-and-
yosemite-sam-built-a-restaurant-and-the-people-came.

20. Crouch, “Pocahontas and Yosemite Sam Built a Restaurant...and the People Came,” A Yelp.com
reviewer offered a similar description, “I was amazed of how creative this place was -- it’s like a Taiwanese
restaurant meets POCAHONTAS.” “Uncle Yu's Indian Theme Restaurant,” Yelp.com, accessed October 15, 2013,
http://www.yelp.com/biz/uncle-yus-indian-theme-restaurant-san-gabriel.

Mo’e’hahne 200
(With the added squick [sic] factor that Taiwan has treated its own ‘Indian’ population of
aboriginal groups…) It really takes the fun out of it. It is so obtuse, it is horrifying.
21

The reviewer insightfully connects the “decimation,” and “marginalization” of Indigenous
people in North American to similar forms of Indigenous dispossession in Taiwan. The reviewer
also exposes a transnational cultural foundation of settler-colonial violence that is undergirded by
settler necropower and its concomitant colonial “amnesias” and “disavowals”
22
across global
Hispanophone, Anglophone, and Sinophone settler cultures: Indigenous people must endure
necropolitical abjection in order for their iconographies and socialites (simulated or otherwise) to
be appropriated and resignified by the colonizing bios. Taiwan, in fact, is home to Indigenous
peoples who have fought, been dispossessed by, and negotiated relationships with a range of
settlers, colonists, and military forces over their nearly four-hundred-year experience of
colonialism and settler occupation—including Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese occupations and
necropolitics. The settler-colonial past and present of Taiwan helps explain the
Taiwanese/American owners’ (willful) apprehension of the Indian as merely a commodified
trope rather than as living socialities. Although these English language texts do not represent
Chinese speaking publics engagements with the restaurant, they are illustrative of how Uncle Yu
Indian has been received and circulated in Los Angeles public culture.

21. “Uncle Yu's Indian Theme Restaurant,” yelp.com.

22. Shih, “Introduction What Is Sinophone Studies?” in eds. Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian
Bernards, Sinophone Studies, 5. See also Ronald G. Knapp, eds. China’s Island Frontier: Studies in the Historical
Geography of Taiwan (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1980); Kun-hui Ku, “Rights to Recognition:
Minority/Indigenous Politics in the Emerging Taiwanese Nationalism,” Social Analysis, 49 no. 2 (2005), 99-121.
Mo’e’hahne 201
Settler-Colonial Phenomenologies and Indigenous Object Necro-Economies
When considered in the history of repressive and appropriative Indigenous
representations that fill Euroamerican settler representational culture, the forms that comprise
Uncle Yu Indian’s décor are unremarkable and anachronistic. The owners selected seemingly
predictable objects to convey an “Indian” theme: weapons, figurines, and visual representations
of Indigenous people. The restaurant circulates stereotypical images of Indigenous men as
historicized warriors alongside the sexualized figure of the Native woman, which is foremost
represented through the wait staff’s embodied presence. There are no forms that attempt to
represent contemporary Indigenous peoples, perhaps because the settler common-sense aesthetic
is not oriented towards the signification of actual Indigenous lives. Upon closer examination,
however, the seemingly banal figurations reveal the ways that settler-colonial violence is
naturalized in everyday material and cultural practices, and how these routinized practices
delimit Indigenous people as categories possible life through relations of “objectification.”
By proposing an “ethnography of things,” Sarah Ahmed offers a method for considering
how objects are culturally produced through the disciplinary webs of common sense and, thus,
apprehended and given meaning through everyday practices. “If phenomenology turns us toward
things, in the terms of how they reveal themselves in the present,” Ahmed writes, “then we may
also need to ‘follow’ such things around through an ‘ethnography of things’ in order to
comprehend the processes of crafting the social, forms of power, and the traces they leave on
objects.”
23
Such an analysis can, therefore, expose the ways that ideology works to both produce
and come to be collected in everyday objects. In the context of occupied North America, the
dialectical genealogies of colonial violence can become manifest in objects as social traces.

23. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 39.
Mo’e’hahne 202
Ahmed further posits that ideology shapes how subjects come to witness and understand objects
within given social contexts.
Uncle Yu Indian’s décor is intended suggest traces of the Indian while performing one of
the key functions of the genre of the “ethnic restaurant” identified and lauded by Jonathan Gold,
creating a “mild sense of dislocation.” Uncle Yu Indian transports visitors to “wholly
unexpected” spaces and times. The restaurant is dominated by log-cabin interior, which is
punctuated by large faux trees. The tree trucks extend from the floor to the ceiling and spread
their branches over the tables of the central seating area. The lower branches seemingly reach for
the customers seated at large wooden tables. “East Asian” ornaments, such as paper lanterns,
hang from the branches. By transiting the figure of the Indian, the restaurant performs dual
settler spatial and temporal transformations: the décor simultaneously works to create a nature-
oriented woodland experience that is phenomenologically intended to symbolize the presence of
Indigenous people, who are imagined as only existing in woodland and non-sub/urban spaces.
The Chinese decorations and food cultures, on the other hand, transport visitors to the late-night
pubs of Taiwan. By creating a rural landscape in order convey an Indigenous presence, the
restaurant reproduces punitive settler-colonial ideological mappings that cast rural/reservation
spaces as the proper location for Indigenous people. The spatial and material forms of the
restaurant itself, however, naturalize the settler-colonial possession of sub/urban spaces and
exclusion of the Indigenous people (the Gabrielino-Tongva) from the built environment. By
seeking to create alternative settler spatio-temporalities out of the commodified Gabrielino-
Tongva homelands that the restaurant physical occupies, the restaurant owners recreate the very
logics of Indigenous dispossession, dislocation, and settler possession that are required in the
first place to transform the homelands into a suburban strip mall (an archetypal spatial form of
Mo’e’hahne 203
settler Americana). In this way, like Edward Soja’s postmodern spatial musings or Karen
Tongson’s racial, gendered, and sexually “queered” suburban settler colonialisms, occupied
Indigenous space is infinitely fungible.
Aside from the wait staff, the presence of the “Indian” is most powerfully communicated
through the Indigenous object figurations at the restaurant. For instance, a pair of Great-Plains-
style war lances hangs on a wall. They cross one another as if connecting in battle. A scene
depicting two male figures wearing headdresses, feathers, jewelry, and loincloths and holding
spears is painted another wall. The spears overlap as one figure stabs the other. The painting is
done in what can be described as a combination of rock-art and Plains Ledger Book art styles. A
large white and red neon sign that reads “Indian,” with a feather for the second “i,” hangs above
a doorway. The head of an Indian man with a stoic, dead gaze hangs on the wall of smaller
dining room. The man wears a fuax coyote hide, with deer antlers affixed to the coyote’s head,
and a faux bone breastplate. Kachina dolls stand on a shelf, dancing next to ears of dried corn. A
war shield with feathers hangs on another wall. An American flag with the superimposed image
of a shirtless Indigenous man on horseback hangs on another wall. The plastic head of a female
Indian child (doll), with closed eyes and long black hair, hangs form another wall. The child’s
head protrudes from a synthetic animal skin pouch. The taxidermy head of an elk hangs from a
tree in the main dining areas. Various beer advertisements fill the spaces on the walls between
the objects of Indian imagining/hating.
Mo’e’hahne 204
Figure 9 Native man’s head, “Uncle Yu Indian Theme Restaurant,” Yelp.com

The collection and display of seemingly dead and dismembered Indigenous bodies,
through the man and child’s heads, characterizes the restaurant’s “Indian” aesthetic. As
commodified, decorative objects, the heads-without-bodies are grotesque forms of “Indian
hating.” As physical objects, they symbolize the dehumanizing reduction of Native peoples to
incorporeal objects, that is, no longer subjects. Indigenous people are, therefore, doubly
objectified: first, in the corporeal sense of dismembering a body, removing a head and placing it
on display, and transforming a body into a trophy. In the necropolitical sense, the objects declare
that Indians are no longer a category of possible life. Working through a new materialist
approach to the rhetoric of racial and sexual othering, Mel Chen writes that “dehumanization
Mo’e’hahne 205
often involves a positive (that is, active) force.” According to Chen, dehumanization takes place
through a combination of actively “removing” those qualities “cherished” as human or the active
“making” of abjected subjects into objects.
24
Transforming Indigenous liminal subjects into
objects that, through their display, are visually consumed by dinning publics thus dehumanizes
Indigenous people by foreclosing their human abilities to exist as a lively corporeal beings
(bios). Proximate to death and reduced to the status of an object, Indigenous people can,
therefore, only exist as collections of signs that can be resignified and commodified—and at the
restaurant exist as pieces of a decorative aesthetic. The dehumanizing objects also figure
Indigenous peoples as beyond setter common-sense understandings of time. They are
temporalized past the point of being historicized; figuring Indigenous peoples as mere objects
rather than subjects renders them at once dead and never having lived or existed.
The Indian object economies of Uncle Yu extend the corporeal commodification of
Indigenous bodes that characterized the eighteenth and nineteenth-century settler necro-
economies discussed in chapter one, which remade Alta California and Yaanga. The plastic head
of a man wearing a pelt with antlers functions as a trophy mounted on the wall. This
configuration of Indigenous death which rests on the preservation of bodies for exhibition is
solidified by the owners’ decision to hang a taxidermied elk in the next room. The visual
Indigenous signs at the restaurant circulate thorough patterns similar to what Jacques Derrida
calls free play, where “signification has no limits” as the “sign” can be reworked, invested with
new meaning(s), and made to correspond to an infinite chain of signifieds.
25
(Such relations of

24. Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2012), 43.

25. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, “in Writing and
Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 281.
Mo’e’hahne 206
infinite meaning characterize most Indigenous significations in settler culture.) The elk, man, and
child’s mounted bodies, therefore, simultaneously signify a bountiful hunt, prized kills, mastery
over nature, and/or mastery over Indigenous savagery. The objects also represent the restaurant
owners’ and the patrons’ museum-like possessive consumption of Indigenous artifacts and
bodies. Faux mounted heads of other non-native human bodies are not as widely available or in
circulation in settler public culture. Mounted Chinese/American heads, Mexican/American,
Korean/American, or African/American heads, garbed in imagined “traditional” clothing do not
exist as freely circulated objects in settler consumer Americana, only Indian heads are
consumable and re/presented in such a fashion.
In practices of racialized dehumanization, Chen observes that “perhaps the most
unsparing” form “is an approximation toward death.”
26
Such an approximation clearly
underwrites Uncle Yu Indian’s object necro-economies. When the mounted head, the war-lances,
and the figure in the painting being stabbed are considered together, they communicate an
aesthetic fascination with and reliance on violence and Indigenous destruction—the logic of
elimination visually animated. The stabbing scene presents Indigenous people as always already
close to death and in the process of dying, while the mounted man’s head presents Indigenous
people as already dead. How might the production and circulation of these objects be shaped by
settler-colonial necropolitical regimes that both circulate in colonial common sense broadly and
have been exacted on the Indigenous lifeworlds of the Yaanga region in particular?

26. Chen, Animacies, 43.
Mo’e’hahne 207
The “Past-Present” of Indigenous Death/Objects
The mounted head of the Indian man symbolically recalls the trade in Indigenous bodies
that, beginning in the sixteenth century, engulfed the borderlands of New Spain and were
sustained throughout Mexican and US occupations. These corporeal object economies
transform(ed) Indigenous bodies into property, which resembles another form of objectification.
Uncle Yu Indian’s mounted male head recalls historic Spanish colonial violences exacted on the
Gabrielino-Tongva by the Mission San Gabriel slaving colony and its settler-military cultures of
violence. As discussed in chapter one, the Spanish soldiers attacked Gabrielino-Tongva people
on horseback, shot the men, and used ropes to capture the women as if they were livestock:
In the fall of 1771, shortly following the establishment of San Gabriel mission in the Los
Angeles Basin, Kumi.vit [Gabrielino-Tongva] leaders attacked the mission twice, largely
in response to the rape of Kumi.vit women by soldiers assigned to protect the
Franciscans. The soldiers killed one important Kumi.vit chief and placed his head on a
pole as an example to the other Indians.
27

In response to the assaults, rapes, and abductions, the Gabrielino-Tongva attacked the mission.
Following Spanish imperial corporeal violence practiced across the borderlands of New Spain,
the soldiers at Mission San Gabriel beheaded a tribal leader and displayed his head for the
colonists, Indigenous slaves, and subjected Indigenous communities to witness. The torrents of
Spanish and Mexican colonial violence in las Californias and Santa Fé de Nuevo Mexico regions
institutionalized the “harvest” of Indigenous bodies and body parts and their transformations into
what Ned Blackhawk calls “corporeal coins.”
28
Colonists displayed the corporeal trophies to

27. Zephyrin Engelhardt, OFM, Missions and Missionaries 2:116; and Edward Castillo, “California Indian
Women and the Missions of Alta California,” paper presented at symposium on “Spanish Beginnings in California,
1542-1822,” Santa Barbara, California, July 16, 1991 all cited in Jackson and Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and
Spanish Colonization, 75.

28. For example, describing Spanish-Ute relations in colonial New Mexico in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Ned Blackhawk narrates the “harvest,” transit, and display of Indigenous bodies as corporeal
traces of the far-reaching regimes of violences that penetrated and forever altered Indigenous lifeworlds:
Mo’e’hahne 208
communicate their attempts to exert necropolitical and sovereign control over Indigenous lives
and lands. The Indigenous body, then, becomes a representation of what Ned Blackhawk calls
the “violence over the land.”
29
(And the production of Indigenous “corporeal coins” would be
replicated in Euroamerican material culture for centuries, for example, through the “Indian-head”
coins minted by colonial governments out of minerals extracted from Indigenous homelands.
The Indian-head currencies, in turn, were traded as material significations of colonial
necropolitics in the settler political economies.) Apprehended as animals to be captured and
objectified, the bodies and lives of Gabrielino-Tongva women in the violent orbits of Mission
San Gabriel were subjected to multitudes of corporeal violence. When Indigenous communities
resisted, they were disembodied and further transformed into objects to be displayed. Such
violences ephemerally haunt the spaces of the San Gabriel Valley and beyond, for they were the
practices that produced and sustained settler-colonial occupation since its violent genesis. In
1771, Mission San Gabriel was located near the present-day cities of Montebello and Pico
Rivera. However, today it is located approximately a mile from Uncle Yu Indian. Located in the
spatial and temporal continuum of this violence, the man and child’s heads displayed in the
spaces of the restaurant symbolically communicate the ascendancy of the multi-ethnic,

“Approaching the victims and pulling up their heads by the hair, they swiftly removed tender cartilage from the
skulls of the dead…The ears were collected in bags, dried, traded…these corporeal coins…[w]hatever their
origin…eventually arrived in Santa Fe, the center of power in the region…[The trophies would find their way into
the hands of laborer, likely an Indigenous slave.] She may even have been related to one or more of the victims…A
needle was…thread through each shriveled medallion, securely lacing all the victims’ ears into strands that
resembled the strings of dried chilies, or ristras, that adorned city streets, Pueblo homes, and ranches throughout the
province… [The ears were then presented to the Governor who directed their placement.] The Palacio’s architecture
spoke of dominance and power, but even more eloquent was the macabre decoration hanging in its portal: strings of
dried ears of indigenous people killed by parties commissioned by the governor to punish Indian neighbors.”
Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land, 16-17.

29. Ibid.
Mo’e’hahne 209
specifically Taiwanese/American, settler-colonial hegemonies to the present-day Gabrielino-
Tongva of the region.
With the start of the US occupation of California, the gold rush, and subsequent massive
settler migrations of the mid nineteenth century, government sponsored genocides against Native
people erupted in Northern regions of what would become California. Citizen militias funded by
the California Governor and local governments carried out the killing.
30
The state would
reimburse settlers for travel costs and ammunition.
31
The genocides created a new necro-
economy of Indigenous bodies, including the collection of scalps, heads, and other body parts.
The killing served dual colonization purposes: mass murder worked to generate income for
bands of white, American settlers while clearing the land so that it could be colonized and
possessed. For instance, Shasta City, a colony in northern California “awarded five dollars for
each Indian head presented to municipal officials.” The “white residents of Honey Lake [would
pay] twenty-five cents per Indian scalp in 1863.”
32
Men returning from massacres would attach
scalps to their weapons and belongings as trophies. Scalps would also be hung in the center of
white settler communities for public display.
The collection and display of Indian heads as pedagogical and decorative objects also
have deep histories in North American setter Americana and the production of national material
cultures. In 1877, after learning that a new group of Indian “prisoners of war” had been

30. Genocidal campaigns and practices in Southern California under US rule consisted of starvation,
imprisonments, slavery, and other forms of social death and were predominantly carried out through public policy.
Brendan C. Lindsay. Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873. (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2012).

31. Lindsay. Murder State, 210-220.

32. Trafzer, Clifford E. and Joe R. Hyer, eds. Exterminate Them! Written Accounts of the Murder, Rape,
And Enslavement of Native Americans during the California Gold Rush. (East Lansing: Michigan State University,
1999) 28-29.
Mo’e’hahne 210
incarcerated at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, the Smithsonian National Museum
commissioned a casting of the prisoners’ heads.
33
Animated by the fields of ethnology,
phrenology, and “Indianology,” the Smithsonian sought to materially capture the Indian heads so
they could be studied and exhibited. Full-head casts were made of the surviving sixty-four
Arapaho, Caddo, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa prisoners, which included one child, two
women, and sixty-one men. Thirty-three of my relatives had their heads cast.
34
At the
Smithsonian, the heads were displayed in large glass cases. Unlike busts, which display the head,
neck, and shoulders of a subject, the Indian heads were displayed as they “had been cast, severed
at the top of the neck and attached to a square base.” This style of presentation, writes Jacqueline
Fear-Segal, “gave the chilling impression of decapitated heads, similar to war trophies.”
35
The
Indian objects produced at Ft. Marion froze the Indigenous faces in a moment of carcerality and
terror and put them on display within the settler state’s national, life sized, public archive. The
heads thus project traces of unending Indigenous imprisonment through time.

33. Built by the Spanish, Ft. Marion, has served as prison for Indigenous people throughout its history.
Under US occupation it became a prison for Indigenous peoples from across the North America who were
incarcerated through the nineteenth-century wars of expansion. Ft. Marion is where the Henry Pratt began his
program of “killing the Indian” through civilization by experimenting on Indigenous “prisoners of war.” Pratt’s
“program” was eventually expanded into the residential boarding school system that adducted thousands of Native
children from their families and resulted the deaths of hundreds of children.

34. My relative and family namesake was among the prisoners. Identified as “Mo-e-yan-hoy-ist” in US
Army documents, he was charged as a “Ringleader” and arrested at the Cheyenne Agency in Indian Territory in
1875. He died at the age of 41 while imprisoned several months before the casts were made. The cast heads,
therefore, only include my extended relations. See “Letter from Richard Henry Pratt” in Proceedings of the National
Museum 1878, vol. 1, 202, accessed 5 January 2017,
https://archive.org/stream/proceedingsofuni1187unit#page/204/mode/2up. After the casts were completed, Clark
Mills, the artist commissioned to make casts, wrote: “They are undoubtedly the most important collection of Indian
heads in the world, and when they have become extinct, which fate is inevitable, posterity will see a fact simile [sic]
of a race of men once overrun [sic] this great country, not only their philognomes but phrenological development
also.” Jaqueline Fear-Segal, “Plaster-Cast Indian at the Nation-Museum” in Jaqueline Fear-Segal and Rebecca Tillet
eds. Indigenous Bodies: Reviewing, Relocating Reclaiming (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 43.
The Smithsonian later made casts of the Dakota children who were taken from their families and sent to the
Hampton Institute as part of the program that would become Carlisle Indian School.

35. Jaqueline Fear-Segal, 45.
Mo’e’hahne 211
While the child and man’s heads displayed at Uncle Yu Indian may be intended as benign
decorations, the circulation of Indigenous bodies as objects cannot be separated from the
genealogies of violence that pervade the colonial cultures of North America. The possessive
display of disembodied, plastic Indigenous heads in the commercial and affectively oriented
spaces of a restaurant resembles the “diffusion[s] of terror and violence perpetrated under rubrics
of pleasure, paternalism, and property” that Saidiya Hartman theorizes as the “scenes of
subjection” that abjected black bodies within the matrixes of nineteenth-century American
culture.
36
As objects whose production and circulation is only made possible by previous acts
violence, the Indigenous heads enact new representational and epistemic violences while
allowing the violences of the past to bleed in to the present. The practices and ideologies that
position the Indigenous before what Denise da Silva calls the “horizon of death” thus allow the
owners of Uncle Yu Indian to figure the Indigenous as disembodied decorations.
37
These
physical object-embodiments of obliteration bear the traces of multitudes of Indigenous
embodied and psychic trauma at the hands of settler-colonial necropower—whose diffuse
enactments are now practiced by the Taiwanese/American restaurateurs.

Playing the Indian Woman
Aside from being one of the few late-night, Taiwanese-style pubs in the San Gabriel
Valley, Uncle Yu Indian’s wait staff are an important draw for customers, which help to secure
its place in the local culinary political economy as the “Taiwanese Hooters.” The restaurant is a
multi-sensorial space of consumption where eating publics visually and affectively consume the

36. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Oxford), 4.

37. da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race,116-117, 25-30.
Mo’e’hahne 212
“Indian” wait staff alongside the equally affective and embodied consumptive practices of
eating, drinking, and watching television and listening to pop music. There is disagreement
among feminist theorists about the objectification of feminine subjects in visual culture and the
phenomenologies of gender they produce. For instance, some argue that sexualized
representations of women in visual media eclipse the subject’s agency and theorists argue that
the sexualization of the feminine subject is purely a process of object-making for a male, (white)
heteronormative gaze and the product of heteropatriarchy. Others, however, argue that there are
multiple possibilities and registers for transgressing and subverting the hegemonic cultural
meanings at work in gendered, sexed, and sexualized visual cultures and the related forms of
embodied and affective labor, such as pornography.
38
In the case of Uncle Yu Indian, however,
analytical attention to possible forms of agency that might be present in the wait staff’s Indian
play can be suspend. Instead, analytical focus can be placed on the multiple cultural meanings at
work in representational and labor practices that require Asian/American female subjects to play
Indian in the context of transnational, racial capitalism and Los Angeles settler colonialism.
Through their gendering and eroticization, the “scantily-clad waitresses in moccasins and
feathered headdresses” become embodiments, objects, and experiences that patrons can become
oriented towards. Jean Barnum argues that the historical portrayals of Indigenous women in
Euroamerican colonial culture resulted from the ways that Indigenous women’s bodies were
apprehended. Because colonialism was focused on controlling Indigenous sexuality, Barnum

38. For discussions of visual representations of women, object making, and patriarchy see Catherine
Mackinnon, “Pornography: On Morality and Politics,” in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989); Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality,” 267-293 in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (London: Pandora);
Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian American Women on Screen and Scene
(Duke University Press, 2007).

Mo’e’hahne 213
argues, Indigenous women were always sexualized and everything they did was read as sexual.
Through this overdetermined eroticization, the Indian woman was/is figured as always available
to the white male, heterosexual settler colonist.
39
(However, while the wait staff’s Indian play
may be intended for a male heterosexual gaze, the consumption of these embodied and affective
labors, of course, is not limited to a Sinophone, Asian/American, male, cisgender, or
heterosexual subject position.
40
) The embodiment of the Indigenous woman is foremost achieved
by the suggestively erotic uniform that female employees are required to wear. The uniform
consists of beaded and faux-leather headbands with a single colored feather tucked in the back.
The staff also wears tank tops that expose the shoulders and portions of the back, which have the
word “Indian” printed on the right bust. The uniform also includes short black skirts, with
“Indian” printed in white letters across the butt. As patrons visually consume the embodied
spectacles of Indian play, they textually encounter “Indian” again and again.
41
The sign thus
serves as a signifier for the always already sexualized figure Indigenous woman.
The wait staff’s performance is also elaborated by the genres affective and embodied
labor that are requited in food service, specifically in contexts where female subjects are
expected to entice and entertain visitors, for instance, those found in sports bars or hostess clubs.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define affective labor as labor that “involves the production

39. Jean Barnum, “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality: Gender, Power, and Race in British Columbia,” BC
Studies, 115-16, 237-66, cited in Huhndorf Mapping the Americas, 106.

40. The representations of Indian woman found at Uncle Yu Indian can be enjoyed by a variety of publics
and, of course, can be(come) the objects of queer desire, enjoyment, and entertainment. They can also be read as not
only suggesting the erotic but a variety of other affective registers, such as pure spectacle. However, it is safe to say
that the embodied performances of the Indian woman are directed at a heterosexual, male subject and specifically
heteronormative imaginaries and desires.

41. The wait staff also wear black pantyhose. Based on from photos that hang in the restaurant, the wait
staff’s uniform used to have more of a buckskin or animal skin look, a black tank top complemented by hide looking
skirt and a brown headband, with or without a feather.

Mo’e’hahne 214
and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact, [and] labor in the
bodily mode.”
42
Writing of the of affective labor practiced by waitresses, Emma Dowling argues
that the political economy of the restaurant is organized around capital’s structuring of the
employees’ material and affective labors so that maximum profits can be generated through
producing customer satisfaction to the point where restaurants become theatre. Dowling remarks
that many of the affective performances of serving the customer can become sexualized and are
almost expected to be gendered, as they often take on a mutedly erotic form.
43
If restaurants
already exist as contexts where performance is normalized as theatre, then such spaces of affect
are ripe for Indian performances and becomings.
44

Visualizing Female Indigenous Abjection:
Visual parings of the wait staff and food are featured in an online video advertisement for
the restaurant. The approximately minute-long video introduces the viewer to Uncle Yu Indian’s
attractions. The advertisement animates the figure of the Indian woman through the wait staff’s

42. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) 291-292.

43. Emma Dowling, “Producing the Dining Experience: Measure, Subjectivity and the Affective Worker,”
ephemera; theory and politics in organization, volume 7(1), 2007, 120, 125.

44. When considering the “Indian” play performed by the laboring Asian/American female subject in the
service economies of the San Gabriel Valley, it is important to note the structured agencies of such a subject position
within the arrangements of global, racial capitalism. Lisa Lowe writes that the restructuring of global capital and
relations of production, particularly since the 1965 US migration reforms, have resulted in the “proletarianization of
Asian immigrant women” and their increased experiences of limited agency. Lowe observes that this
“proletarianization” and exploitation encompasses both Asian women with migrant and citizenship status that, for
example, labor in the West Coast garment industries and service sectors. At the site of multiple intersections of
power, the laboring Asian/American woman’s subject position and agency are structured by the contradictions of
transnational, settler colonialism as well as the racial, gendered, and classed relations of contemporary global
capitalism. This makes reading the laboring Asian/American female subject’s highly structured agency complex.
That being said, we can suspend an analysis of agency and the potential counter hegemonies imbedded in the wait
staff’s affective labor and instead focus on the logics of settler-colonial Indigenous abjection. See Lisa Lowe,
Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 160-164.

Mo’e’hahne 215
embodied performances as they labor over the viewer, which is simulated by the camera’s gaze.
The video is un-narrated and scored by a cool yet upbeat electronic tune. The commercial brings
together shots of the restaurant’s interior and the Indian themed decorations with shots of the
waitresses in their full uniform of red tank tops, headbands, and feathers as they wave and smile
to the viewer and bring food and beer to the viewer’s table. The shots of simulated serving are
mixed with close-up shots of various dishes that prominently feature non-human animal flesh.
45

For example, in one shot, a waitress brings a plate of what appears to be chicken flesh to the
viewer’s table. The camera is positioned looking up from the table, simulating the gaze of a
seated patron. The waitress sets the plate down and waves her hands around the plate of dead
animal flesh, as if gesturing voilà, as she smiles at the viewer. As she performs the required
corporeal and affective labors of Indian play, her agency, however, remains visible as she
appears to be trying not to laugh at the absurdity of the performance and gestures. The
performance is repeated as another waitress brings a platter of animal flesh and vegetables to the
viewer’s empty table. She sets it down and then stands in front of the table smiling and looking
into the camera as if waiting to serve the viewer and take the next order. The scene then cuts to a
close-up of the food, glistening with greasy moisture.

45. “Uncle Yu's Indian Theme Restaurant,” yelp.com.
Mo’e’hahne 216

Figure 10. Video advertisement, “Uncle Yu Indian Theme Restaurant,” Yelp.com

The advertisement figures the Indian-playing waitresses as the restaurant’s central attraction.
Through the position of the camera and composition of the shots, the advertisement simulates a
series of moments where the waitresses perform intimate, and almost exaggerated, corporeal and
affective labor for the viewer. The wait staff are sure to look into the camera, smile, and offer a
fleeting simulated eye contact (arguably having been instructed to do so by the video’s
producer). As forms of erotic cinematic spectacle, as Laura Mulvey observes, the Indian women
are simultaneously looked at, displayed, and made to “return” the viewers simulated gaze.
46
A
cursory reading of the video would suggest that the wait staff are merely objectified and
eroticized as female Asian/American laboring subjects. However, attending to the multiple
colonial, sexual, gender, and specist regimes at work in the spaces of the restaurant reveals

46. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures,19.

Mo’e’hahne 217
distinctly transnational, settler colonial layers of eroticization and necropolitical hierarchies
beyond the simple demands that capital places on labor in the political economy of the ethnic
restaurant.
Normative figurations of Native female bodies present them as erotically subservient, as
metaphors for settler colonists’ access to and control of Indigenous homelands, and thus
embodied iconographies of settler possessive logics. In “The Pocahontas Perplex,” Rayna Green
argues that in Euroamerican colonial culture Indigenous woman have often been represented
through forms of eroticized servitude that are performed for the heterosexual white male settler.
47

According to Green, the Native woman was first represented as a nature-bound Mother of the
Americans, or the symbolic Mother of the land. This Indigenous Mother was imagined as
birthing the non-native settler societies and later the settler nation states that would come to
occupy and repopulate Indigenous homelands. The Native Mother ideologically cemented settler
colonizing claims to Indigenous lands by metaphorizing heterosexual reproduction as the vehicle
for settler conceptions of belonging and inheritance.
48
The Indian Princess, according to Green,
emerged in settler imaginary as a figure that saved or healed the white, male colonist only to fall
in love with him, as demonstrated in narrative of Pocahontas and John Smith. The Princess exists

47. Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex.”

48. The Native woman as a sexually available, submissive, and uncomplicated healer is also represented in
Indigenous cultural production but instead as a figure that serves the Native man (perhaps an analogue for Native
patriarchy), thus illustrating the pervasiveness of this figuration. For instance, in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,
the protagonist, Tayo, is healed by an almost mystical (Laguna Pueblo?) woman, Ts’eh, who lives in the mountains.
With very little verbal communication, Ts’eh labors over Tayo: she feeds him, has sex with him, and gathers herbs
for a medicine to cure his traumas. In the novel, she is given very little depth or characterization beyond her sexual
availability and servitude. And once the episode of healing and reflection is completed, Tayo leaves Ts’eh and her
mountainous nature dreamland (not unlike the Indian Princess in the woods), while the reader is made to believe
they never meet again. However, Ts’eh does not kill herself once Tayo leaves unlike the Indian Princess of settler
mythologies. See Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. For a reading of this episode
in Silko see David Treuer, Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, St. Paul: Grey Wolfe Press, 2006.

Mo’e’hahne 218
as both an object of desire and possession for the white male settler. The Princess’s body, like
the Native Mother, symbolizes the land. The land, in turn, is transformed into her body. These
Indigenous figurations present Native women and Native homelands as always accessible to the
settler and thus, as Chris Finely has observed, penetrable.
49
Furthermore, as the white colonist’s
healer, the Princess collects the healing bounties of the land—food—and presents them to the
white male settler, thus symbolically nourishing the colonizing bios and the polis. Green writes it
is, therefore, no coincidence that the “Indian Princess,” as the subject who offers the fruits of the
land to the settler, has been featured on colonial advertising for the centuries, particularly for
foods. Advertisements with the figure of the Native woman as the healer-provider can still be
found in public consumer cultural forms, for instance, the Indian “maiden” of the “Land
O’Lakes” consumer products. For example, the Land O’ Lakes maiden wears a buckskin and
beadwork dress as well as a headband with feathers, like the Indian-playing wait staff at Uncle
Yu. The maiden is always depicted as seated on her bent knees, holding a package of butter,
while smiling and gazing at the settler-colonial consumer. She is seated on a patch of green grass
with a shimmering lake, trees, and the Land O’ Lakes text in the background. The nature-bound
Indian maiden is represented as prostrated in submission to the colonial publics who will
purchase her and the bounties of the land generated by settler-colonial occupation. The
Indigenous woman becomes a symbol of the digestible economies that Native land has produced
through regimes settler occupation, labor, and agriculture. Through the figure of the Indian
woman, shadows of settler agriculture and their fruits become a point of identification for

49. Finely, “Violence, Genocide, and Captivity.”

Mo’e’hahne 219
consuming settler publics. Through food, the maiden heals the settler consumer body.
50
Read in
the context of the Indigenous figurations above, Uncle Yu Indian’s advertisement recreates
longstanding tropes and iconographies that cast Indigenous women as subservient to the
colonizing white male bios and as consumable symbols of the land. The advertisement
transforms narratives of feminized Indigenous servitude into a visual ritual of gastronomic and
affective colonial consumption that customers at Uncle Yu can experience again and again. In
this way, the video nearly recreates the Indigenous figurations found in Land O’ Lakes products,
but with the bodies of actual Asian/American women playing Indian. And in the spaces of the
restaurant, this mode of feminized Indigenous abjection is performed for a predominantly
Asian/American settler public, rather than white consumers.

Indian Play and Multiple Patriarchies
Aside from the dominant settler logics that normalize the use of Indian imagery, in
particularly abjected figurations of the Native women, might there something about Indian play
that is particularly enticing and/or entertaining to Chinese/American and Taiwanese/American
consuming and viewing publics? Could the wait staff’s performances say something about
transnational or local Chinese/American and Taiwanese/American male heterosexual desires?
Rather than attempting to represent the subject position of the laboring migrant Asian/American

50. This figuration of the Native as healer through food can be further read as an iteration of the trope of
Indians offering food to save the “colonists,” for instance, as illustrated in narrative of Tisquantum (pejoratively
known as “Squanto”) teaching the Plymouth settlers how to farm. The myth of Tisquantum instructing the settlers in
methods of farming where fish were used as fertilizer (and thus saving the colonists from starvation, and the various
other iterations the myth takes across cultural forms) has been historically challenged as it is has been shown that
Tisquantum in fact had traveled to Europe prior to meeting the Plymouth colonists and learned the farming methods
in Europe, see Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, New York: Vintage,
2006. Additionally, through the figure of Sacajawea, who is often represented as the “Mother of Conquest,” Chris
Finely has theorized similar tropes of Indigenous women serving the territorial and corporeal desires of white male
colonists’ possessive desires. See Chris Finely, “Violence, Genocide, and Captivity,” 191-208.
Mo’e’hahne 220
subaltern, here, I am concerned with how the bodies of the laboring subaltern are used in
figurations of Indigenous abjection through a type of performative, to borrow from Mel Chen,
“transmogrification.”
51

In early-twentieth-century China, it was not uncommon for some high-class female sex
workers to dress in Western clothing and showcase and their familiarity with Western
technologies and culture in order to present themselves as exotic, cultured, and alluring to male
Chinese clients.
52
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese brothels
would also produce catalogues that featured photographs of prostitutes; many of the prostitutes
would be photographed with Western objects. Reading some of these photographs, Shu-Mei Shih
writes, “[t]he erotic allure of these prostitutes for the Chinese male customer partly arises…from
their Western accoutrements.” Shih continues, “with the upholstered couches upon which they
lie and the cultural meanings of photography…in turn-of-the-century China as a specifically
Western product, these photographs are themselves Western mediated diagrams of desire for
Chinese men.” According to Shih, the historical figurations of Chinese female sex workers as
Westernized “elicits” a “transgressive desire” for Chinese men.
53
Relatedly, Chinese prostitutes
in turn-of-the-century San Francisco were also expected to dress in Western fashions. And not
surprisingly, foreign born as well as second generation Chinese women that dressed like

51. Chen, Animacies.

52. Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Cited in Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity:
Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 70.

53. Shih reads the photos through the paintings of contemporary Sinitic artist Hung Liu, who incorporates
the photos into their work. Shih, Visuality and Identity, 70.

Mo’e’hahne 221
Westerners were chastised for behaving like sex workers in turn-of-the-century San Francisco.
54

These relations of local and transnational Chinese/American patriarchy demonstrate “the double
logic of male desire with two divergent expectations for wives/daughters and prostitutes. As
figures of transgression, prostitutes can dress their part; their Westernization adds to their erotic
capital.” Importantly, Shih writes that these figurations represent “a process of selective
endorsement of Westernization to which even Chinese men themselves secretly or openly
aspire.”
55
In these historic relations of heteropatriarchy, affective labor, and eroticization, female
sex workers were made to perform embodiments of the West in order to elicit transgressive
heterosexual male desires—arguably formations inflected by the complex inter-imperial relations
between Sinophone publics and the global north, specifically the British imperial metropole and
US settler colony. Similarly, in Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and
Public Culture, Lisa Rofel observes that in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century, post-
Mao China, young women have come to embody tensions of competing national-cultural desires
of cosmopolitan consumerism. Through globalizing and Westernizing cultural forms, the figure
of the young Chinese women has come to mediate and reconfigure notions of “Chineseness.” For
instance, Rofel writes, “[w]omen literally embody Chineseness, both reproductively and as
objects of desire. But as consumers and subjects of desire, Chinese women also represent the
potential to transcend Chineseness.”
56
According to Rofel, the localization of neoliberalism,
through the routinization of the liberal economic and political forms, represent the

54. Yang, Mayfair, “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and
Women’s Public Sphere in China,” in Spaces of Their Own, ed. Mayfair Yang (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), 35-67, cited in Shih 2007.

55. Shih, Visuality and Identity, 70.

56. Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007), 29.

Mo’e’hahne 222
“Chinesification” of global, liberal hegemonies. In the context of global socio-economic change
across the Sinophone world, the figure of the “Chinese,” woman, specifically in spaces of
consumption, such as Uncle Yu Indian; represents potential transformations and challenges to
Chinese cultural and national hegemonies. This gendered embodiment is, therefore, always
positioned before the horizon of a symbolic transubstantiation from one figure to another, or
from one sociality to another; in the case of Uncle Yu: from transnational Chineseness to
“Indian.” According to Rofel, these tensions and transformations can be read positively or
negatively through hegemonic, I would add transnational and settler-colonial, public cultures and
patriarchal gazes.
57

Reconsidering the visual representations of the wait staff and the affective labors that
unfold in spaces of a restaurant that is decorated with symbols and objects meant to represent the
Indian, could the wait staff’s performances be read as a form of transtemporal
Taiwanese/American patriarchal exotified and as a “Western mediated diagram of desire”? In
this arcade of desire created through the genre of the ethnic restaurant (which has the power to
transport visitors to wholly other locations), has the Indigenous woman come to represent the
West/global north/US through distinctly settler-colonial relations of power and fields of
representation? Because of what Shih calls the “double logic of desire,” the Indian-playing
waitresses, although certainly not sex workers but eroticized affective laborers nonetheless, are
expected to embody the West, the American, and the North American West and the non-Chinese
as part of their eroticization? This might be why, in part, the settler Americana of Indian play fits
so well in the Taiwanese/American late-night themed pub of San Gabriel Valley. Do the
relations of the political economy and transnational Sinophone patriarchies require the eroticized,

57. Ibid.
Mo’e’hahne 223
Asian/American, female laboring subject to be transformed into an “other” in order to become an
exotic spectacle, or a marketable spectacle? Within the settler necro-economies of consumption
and representation, does the figure of the Indigenous woman appear as most available non-
Chinese other to be appropriated and animated? This is likely the case, as the figure of the
Indigenous woman always already exists as a vacated subject position that has been reduced to
merely a possession, symbol, and performance in hegemonic North American settler-colonial
cultures. The Indigenous woman is, to borrow from Jodi Byrd, thus transitable and playable by
anyone. In this way, settler-colonial domination has rendered the Indigenous woman so abjected
that she is always faces threats of embodied and psychic violence and yet only exists as an
ephemeral figure to be animated or commodified in the settler colonial practiced and
representational cultures.

Conclusion
In, The Lonely Queue: The Forgotten History of the Courageous Chinese Americans in
Los Angeles, a public history authored by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California,
the Chinese Historical Society begins the story of the Chinese in Los Angeles by narrating a
striking episode of racial animus that has been circulated in the sociologies of race and place in
the San Gabriel Valley:
The Southern California city of Monterey Park drew national attention in 1985 when
controversy and conflict arouse around the issue of Chinese language signs on numerous
business in that community. At the City Council meeting, some residents demanded that
the city require that all signs in the community contain English only. In rebuttal, one
Chinese American in the audience stood up and pointed out that since many of the local
street names used the Spanish language, and others with Italian, German and French, it
would be as expensive as it would be ridiculous to implement such a demand. To further
his point he asked the audience, didn’t the word ‘America” come from an Italian name?
And since Chinese Americans have played a vital role in the development of Southern
Mo’e’hahne 224
California beginning from California statehood in 1850, how long does it take to become
part of America? [emphasis added]
58

The Chinese Historical Society’s narration of forgotten Chinese history and the Chinese
resident’s rhetorical question (“how long does it take to become part of America”) index the
complex relations of transnational migration, settler-colonial occupation, race, and colonial-
racial affects that take shape on occupied Gabrielino-Tongva homelands. Uncle Yu Indian
Theme Restaurant also represents a forgotten, or rather, largely unacknowledged history of
Chinese/America in Los Angeles as well as a story of becoming. The structures of occupation
and the population and political economies of scale that created the spaces of Uncle Yu Indian
also work to continually dispossess and displace the Indigenous people of the San Gabriel
Valley. The restaurant’s Indigenous figurations not only further settler-colonial logics and
rehearse repressive tropes, they also demonstrate how Asian/American publics have become the
“American” settler in the contemporary moment through their spatial praxes and commodified
Indigenous abjections. The relations of Indigenous objectification and Indian play in the
restaurant inherit colonial praxes of anti-Indigenous violence and articulate them to new non-
white and transnational, settler economies of consumption. As an exemplar of settler-colonial
Americana and by transiting the Indigenous in order to cathect the Indian to the affective,
embodied pleasures of eating, Uncle Yu Indian successfully creates what Jonathan Gold
fetishizes as the most “authentic” Los Angeles experience, that of Indigenous denigration
through ethnic gastronomy. The dialectics of Indigenous objectification in the restaurant signal

58.The Chinese Historical Society of Southern California continues: “The controversy in Monterey Park
was made more acute because by the 1980 census Asian Americans already outnumbered the white population of
Monterey Park...Los Angeles International Airport ha[s] replaced Ellis Island and Angel Island as one of the leading
port[s] of entry for Asian immigrants....conflict and misunderstandings arose, in part due to misperceptions about the
new immigrant community, in part due to a lack of knowledge of the vital role that Chinese Americans have played
in Southern California history.” See “Forward” by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California in Icy
Smith, The Lonely Queue: The forgotten history of the courageous Chinese Americans in Los Angeles. Trans. Emily
Wang (Gardena, CA: East West Discovery Press, 2000), v.
Mo’e’hahne 225
significant ways that the globally-oriented Taiwanese/American commercial cultures visually
apprehend the Indian. Reading an archive of Sinophone visual texts, ranging from mass
marketed film to contemporary photography and painting, Shu-mei Shih argues that Chinese
“spheres of cultural transaction and negotiation shift fluidity” within globality and are
increasingly mediated by neoliberal capital. With the rising signification of the image and
moving image, Shih also argues that the particularities of “Sinophone articulations” have become
increasingly visual.
59
The material, affective, and media spaces of Uncle Yu Indian are,
therefore, translocal articulations of global Sinophone visual and performative commercial
culture. Uncle Yu Indian’s Indigenous figurations attest to the ability of global Sinophone
commerce to become localized to the particularities of Los Angeles settler colonialism, the US
settler political economies, and the (local) necro-economies of Indigenous abjection. Uncle Yu
Indian also succeeds in facilitating global cultural, temporal, and spatial transformation that
settler subjects like Jonathan Gold fetishize through re/creating the late-night Taiwanese pub in
the spaces of violence that are San Gabriel Valley. As a commodified object form that circulates
in global/local Sinophone cultures, the “Indian,” therefore, comes to signify a multiplicity of
meanings. The “Indian” signifies everything and nothing simultaneously: life, death, affective
and embodied consumption, settler sexuality, gendered violence, Chinese patriarchies, global
capital, US settler colonialism, or merely one available decorative object among many.
As Space of Violence has shown, Indigenous people are only permitted to exist as past-
tense tropes in colonial origin narratives, lamentable but not grievable living/dead subjects that
haunt the colonial past-present (chapter one), failing and dislocated aberrations in urban

59. Shih, Visuality and Identity.

Mo’e’hahne 226
modernity that can be transited through colonial affects (chapter two), or in the spaces of Uncle
Yu Indian, commodified death-bound physical objects
60
or performative embodiments that are
available to anyone. At Uncle Yu, Indianness is category of being that can be commodified,
embodied, and sold, while living Indigenous people go unacknowledged. The owners of the
restaurant, like the centuries of colonists before them who captured, destroyed, bought, sold, and
obliterated Indigenous people, profit from selling and working the Indigenous body as an object,
living performance, facsimile or otherwise. The “Indian” objects and embodied performances at
Uncle Yu Indian also consequently serve the symbolic function of replacing living Indigenous
subjects in the spaces of the San Gabriel Valley. However, what happens when the regimes of
Indigenous embodiment exist beyond the relations of a temporary performance and enter the
realm of biopolitical identification and reproductive futurity? In chapter four, I examine these
intersections through the prism of Gabrielino High School.

60. In the colonial present, Indigenous object economies continue through the possessive circulation of
human remains by universities, museums, and individual collectors, many of the remains were collected through
corporeal violence and grave robbing. Indigenous resistance to the continued trades resulting in the passing of 1990
NAGPRA legislation yet the circulation of commodified Native bodies persists. For example, in 2013, the family of
Jim Thorpe, the world-rebound Sac and Fox athlete, sued the city of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania for the return of their
relative’s body. The municipality had illegally obtained Thorpe’s body after his death in 1953 as part of their plan to
rebrand the town. David Zucchino, “Jim Thorpe, Pa., fights to keep its namesake,” 18 October 2013, accessed
November 23, 2013, http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-jim-thorpe-body-20131018-
dto,0,7443553.htmlstory#axzz2lg1PFvFz.
Mo’e’hahne 227
Chapter Four:
“Embracing the Future:”
Suburban Settler Reproduction, Gabrielino High School, and the Figure of the Child
All the time, I’m afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my
sister could happen again. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know who it is, but maybe there is
something else terrible enough to make her do it again. I need to know what that thing might be,
but I don’t want to.
1

-Toni Morrison, Beloved

Dear Parents and Students,

It is with great excitement and anticipation that we will soon begin our 20
th
school year at
Gabrielino High School…I am pleased to see how the hopes and dreams of that first staff and
the community have become a reality…“U.S. News and World Report” magazine named
Gabrielino High School one of the best public high schools in the nation for the sixth
year…“Newsweek” named Gabrielino as one of the Best High Schools in the nation…In 2013-
14, in honor of Gabrielino’s 20
th
year, I am inviting the Gabrielino community to “Be Original.”
In our early years, we established the school as a unique place to learn. We accomplished this by
“thinking outside the box” [emphasis added].
2

- “Principal’s Message,” Gabrielino High School

These contrasting passages demonstrate the divergent relations of futurity and the bonds
between parents, children, and “community” that can arise from settler-colonial configurations of
necropolitics and experiences of racialized terror and duress; in other words, the divergent
relations between the abjected and the those who are selected for biological and ideological
reproduction (as bios). As readers of Toni Morrison’s monumental work of transtemporal
violence and affect can attest, Beloved’s life and death did not come easily, nor did Beloved fade
from memory any easier. Beloved’s after/life was forever connected to the relations of corporeal

1. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 243.

2. “Principal’s Message,” Gabrielino High School,
http://www.gabrielino.sgusd.k12.ca.us/site_view_announcement.aspx?…ssageId=d22a6f91-426c-4d72-8a1d-
ced408f5fbb2&bx=S8&cm=FullPrimary. Accessed August 8, 2013.
Mo’e’hahne 228
bondage and colonial terror that were practiced by “schoolteacher” at “Sweet Home.” The novel,
Beloved, helped inspire Avery Gordon’s path-breaking work on sociological hauntings by
indexing what Macarena Gómez-Barris calls the “past-present” social life of violence. In the
introductory chapter, I outlined the relationships between settler-colonial necropower, bios, and
the logics of elimination. In chapter one, I excavated the “past-present” configurations of
Indigenous abjects and settler necropower in the spaces of Yaanga. I tracked these necropolitical
representational analogues in chapter two and chapter three. In this chapter, I consider how
necropower and the after/lives terror are woven into the social fabric of everyday Los Angeles
(suburban) settler colonialism by examining the creation and naming of Gabrielino High School.
In 1994, the Los Angeles suburb of San Gabriel opened its new flagship public school,
Gabrielino High. The residents of San Gabriel and the municipal school board decided on
“Gabrielino” as a name befitting for the new pedagogical institution. Through their shared
“hopes and dreams,” the suburban settler bios—ordered under the sign “San Gabriel,” which, in
turn, bears traces of the violences of Mission San Gabriel—created a new “Gabrielino
community” on top of the occupied Gabrielino-Tongva homelands. This new Gabrielino
community further displaced the Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva peoples in their own homelands.
As the principle boasts each year in a public letter to the parents and students, Gabrielino has
become one of the most valued high schools in the North American US economy of public
education. The school embodies the community’s “hopes and dreams” for a productive future
through its children. If the commodified spaces of the ethnic restaurant are exemplars of settler
Americana—formations made even more American through the Uncle Yu Indian’s Indigenous
figurations—then perhaps the ultimate form of everyday settler Americana is the (suburban)
public high school. Gabrielino High is a civic, settler institution that primarily serves subjects of
Mo’e’hahne 229
color in a majority Asian/American and Latinx middle-class suburb. For example, during the
2013-2014 school year, Gabrielino High School’s twentieth anniversary, 54 percent of the 1,785
enrolled students were identified as “Asian” (with less than one percent being identified as
“Filipino”), 33 percent were “Hispanic/Latino,” 7 percent were white, and “African Americans”
constituted less than one percent. Only three students enrolled at Gabrielino High School were
identified as “American Indian.”
3

The high school is a unique site of Indigenous appropriation, signification, and figuration
as it does not use the image of an Indian head or other normative caricatures of Indigenous
people as mascots, nor does it incorporate any images of Mission San Gabriel into its
iconography. Rather, the Indigenous figurations at work within the material, textual, and virtual-
media spaces of the school (and beyond) involve the deployment and circulation of the signs
“Gabrielino” and “Tongva” alongside the textual and visual significations of the eagle. Given the
circulation of Gabrielino and Tongva signs at the school, I want to hold in suspension for a
moment the principal’s call in the letter above to “Be Original” and “think outside the box” in
commemoration of Gabrielino High School’s twentieth anniversary. In this chapter, I consider to
what extent does the historic production of Gabrielino High School and its Indigenous
significations, which are intimately tied to regimes of settler necropolitics and pedagogical and
corporeal instruction, represent and reconfigure “originality,” especially for an institution that
serves and coheres a majority non-white, upwardly mobile, suburban student body, both as
corporeal individuals and the larger societal “species body” that Foucault argues is the subject of
biopolitics.

3. California Department of Education Educational Demographics Unit, “Enrollment by Ethnicity for 2013-
14 School Enrollment by Ethnicity: Gabrielino High School.” California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data
System (CALPADS), accessed 22 September 2014.
Mo’e’hahne 230
The public high school exists at the confluence of settler-colonial, civic governmentality,
pedagogical ordering, as well as bio and necropolitics. Gabrielino High School, therefore,
becomes enmeshed in the work of reproductive futurity. As a public disciplinary institution, the
settler-colonial school engages in what Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, calls the production of “subjected, practiced, docile” and thus “useful” bodies.
According to Foucault, through the routinized “machinery” of sovereign (political) power, the
school operates dialectically with the prison (as well as the hospital) in manufacturing and
enforcing domination by converting the body into forms of “aptitude” and productive “capacity”
for society. In other words, within the pedagogical and regulative institutions of state education,
the coercion practiced at the school through disciplinary norms “establishes in the body the
constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination,” which is manifest
as “political obedience” to the governing hegemonies.
4
In the context of settler-colonial society,
the school is one of the most tangible and naturalized extensions of colonial governmentality that
draws in generations of new subjects and instructs them in the normative logics and practices of
settler society. Through the locus of the body, the school transforms the child into a productive
and, thus, valuable adult member of society. Through corporeal and mental repetition, the
pedagogical social organ produces what Antonio Gramsci calls the manufacturing of consent
between settling subjects and the settler sovereignties, which is realized and practiced as the
settler-colonial necro/polis.
5
Such colonial orientations towards biological, ideological, and
material reproduction—and the embodiments they generate—are premised and dependent on
Indigenous elimination, replacement, and the maintenance of the settler political economy.

4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Vintage,1977), 137-138.

5. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
Mo’e’hahne 231
Emphasizing the body, settler sexuality, and settler possessive logics, I begin this chapter
by analyzing how the once nominally white spatial and necropolitical practices of settler
suburbanization became cathected to Gabrielino-Tongva signs and the figure of the child through
the biopolitically charged spaces of the high school. My reading practice in this chapter follows a
morphological approach as I seek to first deconstruct the signs, categories, and histories that
comprise the everyday worlds of settler suburbia in the San Gabriel Valley through investigating
the local colonial configurations of space, possession, migration, and race. I start by situating
suburban settler common sense in relation to the logics of settler possession that cohere through
the “single family home,” a commodified spatial form that is structured by whiteness. By
analyzing migrations to the San Gabriel Valley throughout the mid to late twentieth century, I
explore how non-white settling socialites became enmeshed in forms of suburban settler
common sense and settler sexuality. I read an archive of academic discourse focused on the San
Gabriel Valley that has emerged over the past two decades. I then visit the events surrounding
the naming of Gabrielino High School. Finally, I consider the school’s Indigenous figurations
within the context of twentieth and early twenty-first century settler biopolitical transformation
and the (historic) violences of Mission San Gabriel.

Suburban Settler Common Sense: The Home and Futurity
In the sparse universe of sprawl the elementary particle is the single-family-house.

-Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of
Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
6

6. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the
Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 41.

Mo’e’hahne 232
In the classic Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson describes suburbia as being
comprised of “a single family living in a single dwelling,” organized by “function
(nonfarm residential), class (middle and upper status), separation (a daily journey to
work), and density (low relative to older sections).”
7
While scholars have examined race
relations and migration patterns in the San Gabriel Valley, they have yet to critically
consider settler colonialism in the region, particularly in terms of the settler common
sense, possession, and reproductive futurity as they are manifest in the economies of the
homeownership. For instance, Mark Rifkin writes that the process of buying a home lead
him to consider the omnipresent settler phenomenologies that shape how settler subjects
apprehend Indigenous lands and naturalize colonial occupation via everyday forms of
possession. Homeownership exemplifies the “institutionalized relations of settlement,
produced through colonial law and policy” that “help generate forms of affect through
which they become imbued with a sensation of everyday certainty.”
8
Settler
phenomenologies create a certainty that Native lands can be possesses as the lands are
inscribed as commodified possessions by settler governmentality and settler sovereignty.
Through settler common sense and the machinations of the colonial political economy,
non-native settler and migrant subjects are directed towards practices of suburban
homeownership. “American homebuilders are perhaps the best in the world when it
comes to providing buyers with the private realm, the insides of the house,” write housing
developers Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. Regimes of settler
possession are routinized through the creation of material private space in the form of the

7. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 7, 11.

8. Rifkin, Settler Common Sense, xv.
Mo’e’hahne 233
single-family home, which exists as a micro-recreation of the settler colony. According to
urban studies scholar Greg Hise, in the US, the single-family home was transformed into
a mass-produced spatial commodity through collaborations between the Federal Housing
Authority, regional planners, and housing developers throughout the nineteen thirties and
nineteen forties. For example, large-scale, mass produced housing tracts were constructed
throughout the Los Angeles area during the Second World War to house defense industry
laborers. These necropolitical labor regimes brought additional settling migrants to the
region and initiated new waves of suburbanization.
9
As a possessive spatial commodity,
the home is also connected to the affective and material practices of seeking the
“American dream,” through upward mobility and material accumulations. Given its
proximity to the family, the home is, thus, culturally connected to the logics of
reproductive futurity. For instance, Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck observe, “[m]oving
is a well-established tradition in America, and moving up constitutes a significant part of
the American dream. Not only is working one’s way to a bigger house central to our
ethos but it makes sense functionally as families bring children into the world.”
10

Sara Ahmed’s theorization of “orientation” is also useful in considering how the
suburban home appears and is given cultural and material value in everyday settler
culture. According to Ahmed, the directions that subjects are made to faces and the
objects they are “oriented” towards are “organized” rather than “casual.”
11
The settler
political economy and settler common sense act as disciplinary regimes that shape how

9. Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997), 4, 57-85.

10. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation,44.

11. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 15, 21.

Mo’e’hahne 234
settler subjects perceive reality and imagine the ideal life course as productive,
consuming, and reproductive subjects. Although it can be occupied by a variety of family
forms, the single-family home becomes a repository for all of the normative affective and
material investments that organize the settler political economies and settler biopolitics:
material comfort, privacy, security, wealth, and futurity. The home becomes what Ahmed
calls a “happy object.” It is culturally encoded with the promise of granting “the good
life” “through the promise of future happiness,” practices that, according to Ahmed, are
strengthened through everyday and intergenerational repetition (thus establishing further
links to futurity).
12
In the case of settler suburbanization, the “paths” that subjects are
encouraged to follow, suburbanization, and the objects they become drawn towards,
commodified Indigenous land in the forms of homes, the good life, children, and futurity,
are the result of settler-colonial necropower “directing” them towards what is
phenomenologically perceptible as normal and valuable.
13

Lorenzo Veracini has found similar patterns of settler-colonial ritual, repetition,
and futurity in suburban spatial praxes. For example, Veracini argues that US suburban
formations recreate settler spatial and affective relations through anti-urban desires to
create new biopolitical and self-governing localities, through what he calls the “world-
turned-inside-out-formations” (the suburban polis), discourses of the suburban “frontier,”
and through the cultural constructions of the suburban home. Veracini writes that the
idealized suburban home, for instance, mimics settler homesteads through the stylized
“colonial” and ranch” architecture while the “space surrounding the home [is seen] as

12. Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 32-33.

13. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 15, 21.
Mo’e’hahne 235
essential to reproduction (allowing subsistence farming in the case of the homestead, or
the healthy nurturing of children in the case of the suburban home).”
14
Settler
suburbanism, Veracini argues, thus, depends on processes of “acting” and “enacting” in
both the performative sense and through normative regulatory patterns of enforcement
and compliance. Not unlike the disciplining forms of the suburban high school, the
settler suburban collective, or polis, becomes a disciplinary, possessive form that
embodies and transmits normative logics of production, in the form of the wage labor
performed in order to purchase the home/make mortgage payments and praxes of
reproductive futurity through childrearing. Like the school, the settler-colonial home,
therefore, works to manufacture domination and compliance through the rendering of
useful bodies.
Karen Tongson, however, has argued that the suburbs of Los Angeles can become
sites of queer possibility in terms of counter-hegemonic sexual, gendered, and racial
formations.
15
Tongson posits that creation of non-white and non-normative sexual and
gendered spaces in settler suburbia serve to queer the assumed whiteness and

14. Veracini, “Suburbia, Settler Colonialism and the World Turned Inside Out.” Lorenzo Veracini has
argued that settler-colonial spatial practices and the polities they created seek to secede from the colonial metropole
by creating alternative social orders in other lands. Settler colonies are, therefore, created by displacing and
eliminating the original inhabitants of the new lands that colonist seek to possess. Settler colonization projects,
according to Veracini are in part driven by the settlers’ desire to escape the political economies and social
hierarchies of the metropole, rather than enacting social and economic revolutions, or “world-turned-upside-down”
politics. Through “world-turned-inside-out” colonial expansions, settlers create new societies and political
economies by dispossessing Indigenous peoples. According to Veracini, for instance, settler suburbanizations
resemble larger settler-colonial formations through the political desire to separate from crises of the urban core and
create new local self-governing polities (suburbs) rather than reform the existing social orders of urban decay and
increased populations of a racialized underclass.

15. For instance, Tongson offers such formulations thorough the reading of queer of color arts praxes that
unfold in and traverse suburban spaces. While such analyses offer valuable insight into the ways that normativity is
transcended across geographies, in following such an archive, Tongson’s analyses do little to unsettle the relations
of settler-colonial occupation and Indigenous dispossession, as Indigenous people are only figured in Tongson’s
work and the archives she reads an absence. Tongson, Relocations, 33-34

Mo’e’hahne 236
heteronormativity of “lesser Los Angeles,” as both queers and people of color relocate
and remake settler suburban Americana. However, Tongson, like other scholars that
analyze suburbia without accounting for the interconnecting regimes of settler
necropolitics, possession, and futurity. As a result, Tongson reads the
replacement/displacement of one non-Indigenous sociality and spatial praxis (suburban
whiteness) by another (non-white and queer migrants) as transgressive. Tongson’s
theorizations of sexuality and race do not consider Indigeneity or the ongoing violences
of colonial occupation. In this way, the home exerts it disciplinary power over those who
seek to inhabit and possess it, regardless of sexuality, gender, or race, thus continuing the
relations of settler occupation and the maintenance of productive bodies in order to
secure and possess the home.
In the US settler political economy, home ownership is consequently the primary
means by which wealth is generated and transmitted intergenerationally, further tethering
the home to the material conditions of futurity. Through settler state policies that
subsidized white possession throughout the twentieth century, homeownership became a
central vector of the racially unequal distribution of wealth, primarily through Federal
Housing Authority loans to (straight) white males.
16
According to Wendy Cheng, “[a]fter
World War II, because of exclusive patterns of suburban residential development and the
entrenchment of the suburban home as a key symbol of American politics and morals, the

16. Saito, Race and Politics, 29. For discussions of the sexuality, the G.I. Bill and dis/enfranchisement.
see Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009).

Mo’e’hahne 237
terms white, homeowner, and citizen became increasingly conflated.”
17
Setter-colonial
whiteness, therefore, indirectly structures suburban social forms, through the layers of
colonial “entrenchment” and spatial politics that initially created settler suburbia, even as
these spaces became racially diversified. Sarah Ahmed identifies such routinized
disciplinary forms as the “institutionalization of whiteness.”
18
For Ahmed, this
“institutionalization” describes the creation of white institutions and the material and
ideological work that is performed to sustain them, even amidst the incorporation of non-
whites, as in the case of settler suburbia, which is premised on regimes of Indigenous
dispossession and logics of white possession.

Non-Whites and Commodified (Suburban) Indigenous Homelands
Asian/Americans and Mexican/Americans began migrating to the largely “white-
flight” suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley, such as Monterey Park, after the Second World
War. Following paths of settler common sense, these urban to suburban migrants of color
were lured by the suburban subdivisions of the expanding political economy and the
possessive “happy objects” that regional developers and planners had crafted out of the
occupied Indigenous lands.
19
Although some families were initially forced to use white

17. Such settler stat practices include the institutionalized lending practices of the Federal Housing
Authority which subsidized white male home loans beginning in the mid twentieth century. Wendy Cheng, “The
Changs Next Door to the Diazes: Suburban Racial Formation in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley,” Journal of
Urban History, 39(1) 15–35, 10-11. See also Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, Melvin L. Oliver and.
Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995).

18. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 133; Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive.

19. According to Leland Saito, even though restrictive housing covenants based on race where declared
unconstitutional in 1949, the practice continued. In the early years of Japanese/American migrations to Monterey
Park, homebuyers would purchase a home “through a ‘Hakujin’ (white), and then just transfer ownership.” Leland
Saito, Race and Politics, 26, 25-27; Cheng, The Changs Next Door to the Diazes, 27-33.

Mo’e’hahne 238
interlocutors to purchase their homes, many were eventually able to become homeowners
with the easing of racially restrictive housing policies. (It is important to note that while
the “single family home” and the later ubiquitous “McMansion”
20
of suburban
Americana are circulated as potential possessive objects for a single family, non-white
family formations, especially among Asian/Americans, are more likely to share a
dwelling with multiple generations because of the incomes they generate are less than
those generated by whites.)
21

Beginning in the late nineteen seventies, in order to attract transnational migrant
buyers to real estate in the San Gabriel Valley, the region was advertised in Hong Kong
and Taiwan by both Asian/American and Chinese realtors. According to Wei Li, “[m]any
advertisements about the commercial investment potential and residential opportunities in
Monterey Park appeared in public media in both Taiwan and Hong Kong.” In
transnational Sinophone language media, “Monterey Park was [and continues to be]
referred to as the ‘Chinese Beverly Hills’ and Little Taipei.”
22
Describing the post-1965
migrants, Timothy Fong writes that the, “Chinese newcomers to Monterey Park and
elsewhere [were] not analogous to the historically persecuted and oppressed male
laborers who came to this country in the mid-nineteenth century; they are men and
women generally much better educated and more affluent than either their Chinese

20. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, Speck, Suburban Nation, 41.

21. For example, Wei Li notes that “[h]igher Household incomes may result from the presence of large
numbers of wage earners per Chinese household than in households of other ethnic groups.” For instance, based on
1990 census data, Li concludes that “[m]edian personal income among all ethnoburban Chinese was $1,000 lower
than the [Los Angeles] county median.” However, the median income for immigrant ethnoburban Chinese was
$3,000 higher than all immigrants in Los Angeles County. Li, Ethnoburb, 130.

22. Ibid., 90.

Mo’e’hahne 239
predecessors or their white counterparts.” Similarly, Wei Li writes that the migrants from
Taiwan and Hong Kong:
[M]oved to the United States seeking a safe haven for their investments and their
families…They came with finical resources and settled directly in suburban
middle-class or upscale neighborhoods…these new immigrants were suburban-
bound to begin with; they had neither the desire nor the need to live in downtown
Chinatown.
23

The homebuyers differ from previous waves of Asian and, in particular, Chinese
speaking, migrants as they were upwardly mobile, educated, and sometimes wealthier
than their “white [suburban] counterparts.” Desires for a new life lead migrants to
apprehend the already occupied and commodified Indigenous lands as possessive “safe
havens” for their capital and their families. They continue(d) the relations of Indigenous
dispossession by replacing white suburban homeowners. Settlers from Taiwan, Hong
Kong, and mainland China not only recognized the surplus and reproductive value in
suburbanized, occupied Native homelands but also, like generations of colonial settlers
before them, they were attracted to the land’s imagined spatial aesthetics. For example,
reflecting on the many hills of the suburban developments of Monterey Park, Taiwanese
and Chinese migrants “cited the superior feng shui” as among their motivations for
purchasing a home in the area. Through settler common sense, the middle-income,
Sinophone-origin migrants mapped a new set of desires and values onto the land by
imaging the hills as another geography. For instance, Wei Li observes, “[a]ccording to
Chinese folklore, hilly areas with better views are considered to have better feng shui,
which brings good luck. These hilly areas [of Monterey Park] also reminded immigrants

23. Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown, 5; Li, Ethnoburb, 163.
Mo’e’hahne 240
of the places they came from, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan.”
24
As Lorenzo Veracini
argues, settlers seek to bring home with them when establishing colonies; in this way
they are always home, having never left.
25
Chinese speaking settlers to the San Gabriel
Valley brought their homes with them figuratively by imagining home geographies in
Gabrielino-Tongva homelands and by materially acquiring the possessive, private,
suburban spaces of the dsingle family home.

Settler Sexuality and Migration Policy
The changes in US migration policy of the nineteen sixties permitted increased
entry for skilled workers, subjects with higher educations, and for the purposes of “family
reunification.” The policies allowed for “desirable” and upwardly mobile Asian migrants
to enter the US colony and “settle” in the San Gabriel Valley.
26
Settler policy regimes,
therefore, permitted biopolitical transformations by creating a context where particular
non-indigenous bodies were no longer completely excluded from US property and
migration politics, and were, instead, allowed access to settler suburbia. These
necropolitical and spatial transformations occurred even amid the persistent racial animus
and exclusions that Asian migrants experienced in white suburban hegemonies, for

24. Ibid., 85.

25. Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 98.

26. The 1884 Chinese Exclusion Act, which was revised consecutive times and subsequently made
permanent in 1904 was not repealed in 1943, when the US and China became wartime allies. During the post-1965
migration era, migration doubled every decade from 1960-1990 and maintained a balanced “sex” ratio according to
Wei Li. See Li, Ethnoburb, 53, 56, 59-62.

Mo’e’hahne 241
instance, as Leland Saito and Wendy Cheng have documented.
27
These migration
policies, however, like the history of US regulations of Asian migration, were tethered to
and produced by forms of biopolitics that sought to discipline sexual and gender
formations.
28
For example, the 1875 Page act sought to exclude “coerced laborers” as a
way to regulate female Chinese prostitution, and ,therefore, female Chinese sexuality.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which was made permanent in 1904) sought to
exclude Chinese migration based on the “dangers” to white settler society and sexuality
that were posed by Chinese “bachelor” subjects and socialities. In both instances,
denigrated, non-white and “non-productive” sexualities were perceived as the symbolic
threat that animated the white settler state’s regulation of migration and, thus, settler
sexuality.
29
Policing the boundaries of normative settler sexuality through
migration/citizenship policy illustrates how racial othering operates through sexuality,
while working to exclude both non-native and Indigenous non-normative bodies and
sexualities as aberrant and abjectable. These nineteenth and twentieth century
bio/necropolitics vis-à-vis migration policy also formed dialectically through the

27. Asian migrants to the San Gabriel Valley, specifically Taiwanese migrants to Monterey Park
experienced persistent discrimination at the hands of white suburban hegemonies, for instance, through hate crimes
and English only municipal language proposals throughout the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. Migrants and
their business were also excluded from the municipally subsidized economic developments, notably through the
Atlantic Square project in the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties. See Saito, Race and Politics, 38, 40-
52. The redevelopment of downtown Alhambra in the nineteen nineties and early two thousands has also maintained
similar racially exclusionary patterns. See Cheng, Changs Next to the Diazes, 141-149.

28. Reddy, Freedom With Violence, 150.

29. Ibid., Li, Ethnoburb, 53-55. For similar readings of Asian sexualities and US migration policy see
David Eng, Racial Castration (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 3. For the regulatory sexual regimes of
migration policy and the disciplining of non/productive subjects, sex, and bodies see Jacqui M. Alexander, “Not Just
Any (Body) Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and
Bahamas” 1994, Feminist Review 48: 5-23; Canaday, The Straight State; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides
Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Mo’e’hahne 242
disciplining of Indigenous sexual and gender formations by the settler sovereign.
30
The
1965 Hart-Celler Act, however, shifted discourses away from denigrate and undesirable
subjects to, instead, regulate and “produce” desirable subjects through valuing and
permitting the entry of skilled and educated laborers. These desirable migrant subjects
held promises of heteronormative reproductive futurity by recruiting potential laboring
subjects to participate in the racialized settler political economy. Furthermore, the locus
of the family was emphasized through “family reunification” policies, which reinscribed
heteronormative notions of reproduction and filiation. Family reunification created
patterns of “chain migration” where one person would migrate and then family members
and relatives would subsequently follow, creating paths of settler-colonial transit that
were oriented by the familial bonds which were inscribed in settler law.
31
The 1965
reforms represent Foucault’s theorization of the “regulatory controls” that sovereign
power exerts over life through “politics of population,” which cohere through the body as
biopower.
32
Chandan Reddy argues that constructing the paths of permissible migration
through the family further inscribe the ideal non-native migrant and citizen subject
through what Foucault calls the “deployment of alliance: a system of marriage, of fixation
and development of kinship ties, of transmission of name and possession” which were/are
integral to the deployment of sexuality.
33
For instance, analyzing queer of color

30. Morgensen, Spaces Between Us, 38-41; Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the
History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1-25.

31. Li, Ethnoburb, 53.

32. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139.

33. Ibid., 103 cited in Reddy, Freedom With Violence, 157.

Mo’e’hahne 243
subjectivities in relation to the 1990 migration reforms, which further tethered forms of
entry to “family reunification,” Reddy argues that US legal regimes “institute
heteronormative community structures” in order to secure entry into the settler colony
and accesses to social welfare within the settler state.
34
In this way, the US settler state’s
valuation of the non-white heteronormative family is analogous to the eighteenth-century
biopolitics instituted by the Spanish crown during the founding of the Los Angeles
colony (explored in chapter one). Non-white and multiracial families were selected to
repopulate the Gabrielino-Tongva homelands and the progeny of these unions were
eventually legally allotted tracts of stolen Indigenous land. Taken together, these regimes
of sexuality, migration, and settlement that span centuries of Los Angeles settler
colonialism illustrate that the locus of non-native, both white and non-white, family is
integral to regimes of Indigenous replacement and colonial possession. Scott Lauria
Morgensen argues that the “history of [settler] sexuality” naturalizes Indigenous
disappearance while making the gendered and sexual norms that replace Indigenous
socialites appear “inevitable and final.” Through positioning settlers as merely “those
who come after” the ongoing relations of colonization are erased by regimes of settler
sexuality.
35
I take this detour in order to further establish both the normativity of settler-
state policy (that has historically fluctuated between compulsory and assumed
heteronormativity), because it is through such notions of “productive” and “desirable”
subjects that everyday settler colonialism becomes cathected to the family, reproductive

34. Ibid., 160.

35. Morgensen also contends that queer socialities and the rise of homonormativity also engage is similar
historical and present-day colonial disavowals, relations of Indigenous abjection that are further elaborated by queer
cultural and political appropriations of (imagined) Indigenous cultures. Morgensen, Spaces Between Us, 42, 42-49.
Mo’e’hahne 244
futurity, and, thus, the figure of the child. In other words, the heteronormativity of settler-
colonial sexuality structure the relations of migration, race, property, possession, and
futurity which arise on occupied and commodified Indigenous homelands.

Suburban Settlerism and Raciality
Wendy Cheng argues that the racially diverse communities of the San Gabriel
Valley, comprised largely of Asian/Americans and Latinxs, challenge the linkages
between suburban space and whiteness. The generations who have grown up in this
majority non-white context, according to Cheng, have developed distinctive “moral
geographies of differential spaces.”
36
Cheng argues that these affective and spatial
imaginaries include a “world view that challenge[s] and oppose[s] whiteness as property”
while circulating “majoritarian, non-white” identifications. The moral geographies that
residents develop, “while selectively complicit with dominant racial hierarchies,” Cheng
contends, are “nonetheless deeply informed by antiracist principles” [emphasis added].
37

Through Cheng’s formulation, one of the “antiracist principles” that animates the
majority non-white settler, suburban spatial praxes is the “significance” of
Asian/American and Latinx residents “staying put” and “not selling their home.” In
contrast to the white residents who sold their homes with the arrival of non-white
residents in the San Gabriel Valley, Cheng asserts the that of-color homeowners’ choices
to stay illustrate forms of racial acceptance. “[B]y choosing to move there and then by

36. Cheng, The Changs Next to the Diazes, 26.

37. Ibid., 46.

Mo’e’hahne 245
staying put long term and establishing broad family roots, Asian Americans and Mexican
Americans made the West [San Gabriel Valley] a significant development of a ‘new
polyethnic majority’” [emphasis added].
38
This formulation naturalizes the occupation of
Indigenous lands through continued home ownership and regimes of settler sexuality that
facilitate Indigenous replacement through “establishing broad family roots.” If staying
put and occupying parcels of commodified Indigenous homeland is antiracist, then
Indigenous peoples are figured as outside and beyond race. Indigenous people are
effectively rendered analytically unintelligible through an epistemological formulation
which mirrors Indigenous experiences of necropolitical liquidation in the region.
Cheng’s analysis of suburban racial formations occludes Indigeneity and settler
colonial relations of power. According to Mark Rifkin, settler common sense continues to
operate even when Indigenous people are absent from the land or unacknowledged by
settler phenomenologies.
39
Cheng’s analysis reveals the inability of normative racial
theory to expose and analyze the machinations of settler colonialism in terms of colonial
necropolitics or the settler political economy. Such common-sense renderings of race
operate along what Jodi Byrd has identified as epistemological “axis of
inclusion/exclusion.”
40
US race theorizations that do not acknowledge settler colonialism,
therefore, conceptualize racial subjection through narratives and analyses of being
excluding from the historically white normative regimes settler-colonial enfranchisement,
settler-colonial property ownership, and settler-colonial bios, all of which depend on the

38. Scott Kurashige, “The Many Facets of Brown: Integration in a Multicultural Society,” Journal of
American History 91 (2004): 56-68, 56-57. Cited in Cheng, The Changs Next to the Diazes, 60.

39. Rifkin, Settler Common Sense.

40. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxiii.
Mo’e’hahne 246
historic and ongoing colonization of Indigenous lives and lands. Such normative
formulations of race operate through what Denise da Silva calls the “socio-historic logic
of exclusion.” According to da Silva, the logic of exclusion holds the non-white racial
subaltern as incapable of being universally intelligible like white subjects. Within
Western/Euroamerican knowledge systems, the racial other is excluded from being a
complete, self-determining subject and is, thus, suspended before the horizon of
humanity. Through the logic of exclusion, the racial subaltern is always written as trying
to attain universality, which is comparable to attaining full white humanity.
41
Within the
context of the Los Angeles settler colonialism and the San Gabriel Valley, the histories of
non-white exclusions from property and complete settler enfranchisement that have
unfolded since the mid-eighteenth century position the non-indigenous racial other as
always seeking full inclusion into the settler-colonial order. Structured by whiteness,
these axes of incorporation function as analogues for Euroamerican notions of
universality and complete settler-colonial subjecthood, or bios. Through the racial logic
of exclusion, becoming enfranchised as a complete subject, with privileges that are equal
to whites, becomes the aspirational destination for non-white suburban migrants
(represented by the suburban home and suburban family forms) rather than dismantling
the settler-colonial order and practicing a horizontal politics between non-white,
racialized others and Indigenous peoples. Such axes of inclusion/exclusion work to

41. da Silva argues that the logic of exclusion has been instrumental in the development of racial
knowledge regimes and, therefore, race theory in the Americas and in Europe through the “analytics of raciality.”
Deployments of the logic of exclusion within racial/Western power-knowledge systems work to write racial and
gendered difference as resulting from culture (as cultural and, therefore, civilizational deficiencies). Through the
conditions “affectability,” the racial subaltern is incapable of becoming a self-determining subjection and operating
through Reason. da Silva, Toward A Global Idea of Race, 34-35, 155-157.

Mo’e’hahne 247
maintain settler-colonial biopolitical and economic hegemonies while rendering
Indigenous people as absent from their own homelands.
42
Paradoxically, Cheng’s
formulation affirms what I and other critical Indigenous scholars have asserted, that
Indigenous peoples in the Americas do not constitute a racial group in the normative
sense.
43
Rather, the parameters of Indigeneity and the violences that Indigenous people
are subjected to—while formed dialectically with non-native regimes of slavery and
othering—do not follow the same racial logics, nor can they be remedied through the
same incorporation into and enfranchisements within the settler bios and polis as those
meted out to racialized others in US settler society.
Displacing suburban whiteness through the formation of a “polyethnic majority”
and regimes of non-white colonial possessions reveal a settler colonial privilege that
builds on the white privilege that scholars like Wendy Cheng purport that a polyethnic
majority displaces in the first place. Settler privilege continues to cohere and expand as
forms of racial othering morph under liberal multiculturalism and with the shifting
contours of the settler political economy. Such shifts permit increased non-white,
transnational migration to the settler colony and non-white urban to suburban migrations

42. Cheng does, however, acknowledge the presence of Gabrielino-Tongva communities while discussing a
proposal by some Asian/American residents of the City of San Gabriel to change the city’s motto, “A city with a
mission.” Tribal members opposed the proposal because they felt it honored their heritage and their ancestors’
experiences at the mission. See Cheng, The Changs Next to the Diazes, 159-160.

43. For example, Jodi Byrd has observed that, “The generally accepted theorizations of racialization in the
United States have, in the pursuit of equal rights and enfranchisements, tended to be sited along the axis of
inclusion/exclusion as the affective critique of the larger project of liberal multiculturalism…”However, when
enfranchising American Indians is presented through “discourses of racialization” and further “inclusion into the
nation-state, there is a significant failure to grapple with the fact that such discourses further reinscribe the original
colonial injury.” Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxiii.

Mo’e’hahne 248
to occupied Gabrielino-Tongva homeland.
44
The Latinx and Asian/American
homeowners’ material enfranchisements stand in stark contrast to the Indigenous
Gabrielino-Tongva who do not have a reservation and whose only shared spatial forms is
a small office behind a church in downtown San Gabriel.
45
If, as Cheng argues, the
suburban political and population economies of the San Gabriel Valley represent novel
non-white social formations that have developed a distinct “antiracist” consciousness
which works to distance itself from whiteness, beyond the form of the single/multifamily
home, what forms of Indigenous replacement and abjection do they inherit and recreate
through suburban settler possessive logics? And how do those logics cohere around the
figure of the child in the public disciplinary institution of the high school?

“Our Children’s Future is Our Mission”
The necrpolitical transformation of the San Gabriel Valley that began in the
nineteen seventies and expanded in the nineteen eighties help explain the formation of the
new high school in the city of San Gabriel in early nineteen nineties. The creation of the
school was preceded by the creation of a new school district. At the time, the white
residents of the city of San Gabriel appeared to be responding to the increased non-white
presence and inter-racial tensions in the region. For instance, prior to 1994, high school
students residing in the city of San Gabriel attended school in the nearby city of
Alhambra (as part of the Alhambra unified school district), while elementary and middle

44. My thinking here is draws on Reddy’s theorizations of the ever-expanding rights-based mutations of the
US state that, through liberal multiculturalism, work to further incorporate raced, gendered, and sexual others.

45. Cheng further elaborates the counter hegemonic potential of non-white property ownership and diverse
biopolitics: “The development and assertion of multiethnic, multiracial nonwhite identity points to the social,
cultural, and political possibilities we might find in the rapidly increasing number of “majority-minority”
suburbs…to challenge the reproduction of white privilege and racially exclusive notions of property…” Ibid., 61.
Mo’e’hahne 249
school students in San Gabriel attended schools in their city of residence. At the time, the
Alhambra unified school district served residents of the cities of Alhambra, San Gabriel,
Monterey Park, and Rosemead. According to Leland Saito, in addition to the business
communities that emerged in these spaces, “[l]inkages among San Gabriel Valley
communities…[were] connected politically by the Alhambra School District and its
elected school board.”
46
Each of these cities had undergone a rapid biopolitical
transformation from being white majority and Latinx minority communities to becoming
Asian/American and Latinx majority populations with a white minority. (In the early
nineteen nineties, each city had approximately 40% Asian/Americans and Latinxs and
15% to 20% whites). Throughout the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties,
there was increased racial tension between Asian/American and Latinx students in the
Alhambra school district. For instance, fights, bullying, and school sponsored racial and
ethnic tolerance programs were regularly reported in the Los Angeles Times and other
local news media. However sensationalistic, these articles document and register the
tensions that were unfolding throughout the region during the period which were, in part,
the result of the changing racial demographics and the influx of Asian migrants and their
children.
47
During this time, the San Gabriel school district was also better funded and
had slightly higher performing schools in relation to the Alhambra school district. This

46. According to Leland Saito, the 1990-1991 demographic profile for the communities that make up the
district, Monterey Park, San Gabriel, Alhambra, and Rosemead, indicated that younger child bearing of color
families were replacing an aging white population. Saito, Race and Politics, 24.

47. A review of articles in the Los Angeles Times from 1989-1993 revealed reports of interethnic conflict
and violence between Latinx and Asian/American students in San Gabriel Valley High Schools, the introduction of
tolerance programs to help curb the ethnic conflict, and reports of a Latinx school administrator making derogatory
remarks about Asian/American students at an Alhambra High School. For instance, see Renée Tawa, “Lessons in
Diversity Ethnicity: Two Latino high school students return from a visit to Taiwan with changed viewpoints about
Asians. Now they are peer counselors working to ease racial tensions,” Los Angeles Times, December 31, 1992.

Mo’e’hahne 250
was because the city of San Gabriel had a smaller population and somewhat higher
income-tax base. The racial tensions and the socioeconomic differences between the two
cities are important for contextualizing what happened next.
In 1992, the residents of San Gabriel voted to leave the Alhambra school district
and build a new high school to serve the community. The Alhambra school district sued
San Gabriel over the vote but eventually dropped the case in 1995.
48
This policy initiative
was proposed and supported by a majority white municipal government and importantly a
majority all white school board. The San Gabriel city government and school board was
the least racially diverse governing body when compared to the municipalities of
neighboring cities like Alhambra and Monterey Park and the Alhambra school district,
which served them. Throughout the nineteen nineties, it remained a center of white
political power even with its majority of color student body and residential population.
City officials claimed the new unified school district and high school were needed to
ensure the children of San Gabriel received a first-class education. School board officials
aimed to make the high school a nationally competitive education institution.
49

48. Winton, Richard. “School Reconfiguration Delayed Till ’94.” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1992.
Sullivan, Deborah. “Both Sides Claim Win in School District Unification Ruling Education: Judge’s decision seems
to have invalidated election that created special San Gabriel school zone. The next step is unclear.” Los Angeles
Times, March 31, 1994; Winton, Richard. “School Reconfiguration Delayed Till ’94.” Los Angeles Times,
December 17, 1992. Boyer, Ned. “School Bond Issue to Be Placed on Ballot Education: Funds would lessen the
time old facilities would be used for proposed Gabrielino High School, the city's first. But Alhambra district suit
could overturn election that created the school.” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1993, 5; Walker, Cynthia.
“Alhambra Gives Up Fight to Close Gabrielino High,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1995, 5; Sullivan, Deborah.
“Election: San Gabriel High School Bond Issue Rejected Superintendent says classes will start anyway, at
temporary sites. Backers say a legal dispute with Alhambra district made voters uneasy.” Los Angeles Times, April
14, 1994, 3; Walker, Cynthia. “Court Lifts ‘Cloud’ Over Gabrielino High School Law: New school will remain
open. Dispute centered on vote in San Gabriel for new district. Alhambra sought right to participate in decision.”
Los Angeles Times, December 29, 1993, 3.

49. Winton, “School Reconfiguration Delayed Till ’94.” It was decided that new high school would be
build where the existing middle school, Jefferson Middle School, sat along San Gabriel Boulevard, about a half of a
mile north of Valley Boulevard—the main east thoroughfare that connects Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Valley
Mo’e’hahne 251
The San Gabriel Unified School District circulates settler common sense logics of
possession and futurity in its public significations. These logics are exemplified by the
district’s two mottos: “Our Children’s Future is Our Mission” and “Providing Excellence
in Education Since 1868.”
50
The first motto normatively connects the figure of the child
to an imagined future of prosperity that is accomplished through education. The phrase
“Our Mission” resignifies the city of San Gabriel’s motto “A City With A Mission,”
which, in turn, incorporates Mission San Gabriel as a trace. The second motto,
“Providing Excellence in Education Since 1868,” anchors the school district and its
biopolitical and disciplinary imperatives to the beginning of the US occupation in the mid
nineteenth century. What is uniquely settler colonial about this formulation is that the
district lays claim to a nineteenth-century past even though the city was not officially
incorporated until 1913 (whereas the school district did not exist in its present form until
the early nineteen nineties). Why not claim to be educating the children since 1771, when
Mission San Gabriel was established and the Spanish started their violent instruction?
The school district’s motto also replaces the pedagogical and biopolitical significance of
Mission San Gabriel with the imagined “children” of the colonial present and future.
Through the free play of signs, the motto plays with the dual meanings of “mission.”
51

The school board effectively takes possession of both Mission San Gabriel and the
“mission” of securing their children’s future. The school board, thus, establishes a

and is home to clusters of Asian/American business. A new middle school would be created by merging with an
existing school and be named either Jefferson or Madison.

50. In an almost never ending chain of colonial signification, the San Gabriel Unified School District is also
located on Junipero Serra Drive. San Gabriel Unified School District, “Gabrielino High School 2014-15 School
Accountability Report Card,” http://sarconline.org/SarcPdfs/7/19752911995810.pdf, accessed January 16, 2017.

51. Derrida,“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 281.

Mo’e’hahne 252
transtemporal link between Mission San Gabriel’s violent practices of educating the
Gabrielino-Tongva (as both children and adults) and the present, colonial practices of
educating the City of San Gabriel’s children. The school board’s signification practices,
which play on slippages in meaning, operate according to with what Jacques Derrida calls
différance. Derrida theorizes that within all language systems, meaning making occurs by
establishing the différance/difference between signs, however, meaning is never fixed
because it is, at the same time, always in the process of being deferred.
52
Identifying such
formulations of free play is crucial in contextualizing and analyzing the emergence of
Gabrielino High School and the Indigenous signification practices that surround it
because they illustrate the multiplicities of meaning that can occur in everyday settler
suburban cultures.
In addition to the possessive investment in the children’s future, the school district
declares that it values the community’s “diversity and rich culture.” Through familiar
tropes of multiracial Los Angeles settler colonialism, it articulates an imagined collective
investment in the city’s multiracial student body. For example, according to the school
district, “The ethnic composition of the student body,” which is comprised of
approximately “5,000 students,” is “46%, Asian, 43% Hispanic, 6% Caucasian, 3%
Filipino, and 2% African American” [emphasis added].
53
This figuration, which obligates

52. In Of Grammatology as well as across the essays collected in Writing and Difference, Derrida
elaborates these points by deconstructing the myth of the “transcendental signifier,” that there is a singular center to
language and, therefore, meaning from which all language is structured. Derrida presents one of the paths to the
work of deconstruction by arguing that meaning is never fixed and, therefore, always caught up in the process of
continuous deferment. For example, see, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination. trans. Barbara
Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 156-165; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. 1974. trans.
Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Alan Bass, “Preface,” in Derrida,
Writing and Difference,10-18; Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History
of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 423-431.

53. San Gabriel Unified School District 2014.
Mo’e’hahne 253
the school board and city residents to collectively rear the city’s multiracial student body,
is epitomized by the language that circulated among school board members and city
residents during the 1993-1994 high school naming process.

The Naming Contest and the Figure of the Child
In April 1993, the San Gabriel school district held a contest to name the new high
school. The contest was open to students, parents, as well as all city residents, regardless
of citizenship or property owner status. A naming committee was formed which consisted
of an all-white group of school board members and school district employees. Before the
official public announcement was made, the superintendent, Gary E. Gordon, wrote a
memo to the school board explaining the contest protocols. The memo also included a
draft of the contest instructions. In contest instructions, Gordon wrote:
The high school of most small communities is a center of life and vitality. It is
life’s launching pad for a city’s young adults. Since it perpetually provides the
finishing touches on their youth, the high school represents the point at which the
community embraces the future (emphasis added).
54

Here, the superintendent attributed a unique, animate and biopolitical “liveness”
55
to the
soon to be opened school by representing it as the city’s “center of life and vitality.”
Gordon figures the institution as a representation of the community’s bios and
reproductive futurity. The superintendent’s formulation also represents an affective
orientation towards as well as an affective investment in the high school that is analogous

54. Board of Education, San Gabriel Unified School District, “Process to Select Name of High School.”
Memo from Gary E. Gordon, Superintendent to Members of the Board of Education. April 26, 1993.

55. Chen, Animacies, 2.

Mo’e’hahne 254
to the possessive logics of the suburban, single-family home. The combined practices of
providing a “launching pad” and putting the “finishing touches” on “youth” symbolically
propels the community (both the parents and non-parent residents) forward in time.
Reproductive futurity, animated by the figure of the child, marks the high school as the
site where the community is able to touch and connect with an imagined future. In the
next lines of the memo, the superintendent continues: “The naming of a building or a
campus like the naming of a child is an act of importance because it provides a sense of
identity, heritage and purpose” (emphasis added).
56
Extending the biopolitical
imperatives of the school, Gordon equates the naming of a civic institution with the
naming of a child. The school is symbolically transformed into the community’s
collective child, illustrating the slippages that occur between child, civic, and
reproductive significations.
The superintendent’s figuration also evidences the possessive and affective
character of the spaces that the school would come to occupy. Transforming something
into your child is the ultimate gesture of ownership; it indicates a biopolitical and familial
hierarchy, between parent and child. Furthermore, by describing the school to be as “the
center of life and vitality” and comparing its naming to “the naming of a child,” the
superintendent constructed the school and its student bodies as those who are truly alive
in the community, as those who will live on to “embrace the future.” These formulations
produce the idealized student body as “docile,” open to instruction, and, thus, valuable
while possessing the potential to reach an imagined the future.

56. Board of Education, San Gabriel Unified School District. “Process to Select Name of High School.”

Mo’e’hahne 255
“[T]he Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to
be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.”
57
Lee Edelman argues
that all heteronormative politics are structured by the figure of the child. Through politics
as such, the child becomes the social and ideological disciplinary form through which all
horizons of life and death are tethered. Invested with affective and biopolitical
significance, the child “serve[s] as the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural
identifications” within normative politics. “The Child, [therefore], marks the fetishistic
fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of
identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism.” Edelman
asserts that “collective reproduction of the Child,” is, therefore, “obligatory” as
heteronormative futurity demands that all subjects make compulsory sacrifices in order to
secure the life of the child to come. The child embodies the ideal citizen who is “entitled
to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good.”
58
Against these disciplinary
structures, Edelman argues that queer lives that are not engaged in heterosexual
reproduction are devalued and thus have “no future.” Edelman’s deracinated formulations
of anti-relationality and queer negativity, however, have been significantly interrogated
by scholars working though Queer of Color critique. For example, Jose Muñoz argues
that Edelman’s analyses of the figures of child within white, heteronormative politics
only imagines the position of a white subject (and by extension privileged white parents)
that are normatively entitled to a (corporeal) future in the first place. According to
Muñoz, Edelman erases the figure of the child of color who is always already not

57. Edelman, No Future, 10-11.
58. Ibid., 45, 21,

Mo’e’hahne 256
guaranteed a future and invariably exposed to structures and formations of premature
death and vulnerability. Muñoz proposes that formations of futurity that are cathected to
the figure child are best identified as the “cult of the child.”
59
Edelman’s theorization of
the history of sexuality and normative politics of the child, however, still offer insight
into the workings of settler sexuality and logics of reproductive futurity as they take
shape in the spaces of Gabrielino High School.
Read alongside Edelman, the superintendent’s formulation above refigure the logics of
settler sexuality and possession to cohere around the figure of the multiracial child through the
pedagogical institution of the school. Within the regimes of settler sexuality that facilitate
Indigenous replacement in the occupied Indigenous homelands of the San Gabriel Valley, the
child becomes a “repository” for normative “sentimentalized cultural identifications” and
affective, future oriented investments. Through this biopolitical and affective intersection, the
school becomes the community’s child. As the community’s child, the school embodies the very
disciplinary settler biopolitics and necropolitics that brought the non-white settling subjects to
suburbia in the first place and which also produce the multiracial student body as form of
colonizing bios. Through the spaces of the school, the collective rearing of the multiracial settler
child becomes compulsory.
In the final announcement that was mailed out to the city residents, the text comparing
the naming a building or a campus to the naming a child was taken out. The text, however,
maintained that that school naming was “important because it provides a sense of identity,
heritage and purpose” [emphasis added]. The announcement concluded: “In a sense of

59. Muñoz importantly critiques Edelman’s polemic by arguing that Edelman’s analysis is shaped by his
white male privilege. Edelman, therefore, ignores the subject positions of the queers of color who cannot afford to
give up on the future because of the myriad of social and cultural violences that structure their lives. Jose Esteban
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 94.
Mo’e’hahne 257
community spirit and hope for our children’s future we ask you to participate in the naming of
our new high school.” Residents were asked to submit the name of a “president, famous
American, [or] geographic location” and a supporting “paragraph of 50 words or less.”
60

Announcements were sent home with every child in the district and the chair of the naming
committee visited every classroom at the middle school to discuss the contest. It was decided that
the final selection of names, which would be drawn from the nominations, would be made by the
school board and then put to city residents for a vote.
In response to Edelman’s formulation of a normative, “white multicultural citizen-subject
of futurity,” Chandan Reddy argues that through categories such as the “alien citizen” (foreign
born-naturalized citizens, a category that encompasses many of the Asian/Americans in San
Gabriel) that “we need to understand US liberalism as mediating a multiplicity of regulated [and
raced] subjects.” Reddy contends that such racialized migration categories represent “different
locations within the social order.”
61
While offering a more diverse understanding of US liberal
politics of citizenship, exclusion, and futurity, Reddy, in fact, identifies the very conditions of
possible life that I argue are at work within the settler necropolitics of the racially diverse San
Gabriel Valley (and by extension the racialized migration regimes of the US colonial present
transpiring in occupied North America). In the racial diversifying settler-colonial past and
present of Los Angeles and through the enactments of settler sexuality that take shape through

60. According to the school district, “Any individual residing within the boundaries of the [school distinct
was] eligible to participate.” While “board Members and employees of the [district were] ineligible to participate in
the contest.” The contest represented the newly formed school district’s attempt at being democratic and politically
correct in choosing a new name—even with the intense affective and ideological investments the officials have in
the school and district. Board of Education, San Gabriel Unified School District, “Report from Facility Funding
Subcommittee on Naming the High School.” Memo from Gary E. Gordon, Superintendent to Members of the Board
of Education, prepared by Jane Prendergast. June 28, 1993.

61. Reddy, Freedom with Violence,178.

Mo’e’hahne 258
the locus of the non-native family, we cannot/no longer assume a white subject when analyzing
the figure of the child. The colonial citizenship regimes and life chances of the settler-colonial
present (and of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as demonstrated in chapter one)
include a multiplicity of subject positions that experience racial, gendered, and sexual violence
as well as the possibilities for life and select inclusion as bios in the settler polis. It is, in fact,
these configurations of sexuality that produced the multiracial child and school that, with a
“sense of identity, heritage and purpose,” was in search for a name in the first place.
62
If these
non-white bodies are not marked for corporeal or social death and as they engage in the
normative politics of settler colonization—via pedagogical disciplinary institutions—they will
invariably work to biopolitically replace the Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva and reproduce the
settler-colonial order.

The Contest Entries and the Figure of the Indian
Sixty contest entries were received in May of 1993. The naming committee
narrowed the entries down to a list of seven that were presented to the school board using
the following criteria: “Is the name reflective of our whole community? Is it unique to
our community? Is it indicative of the cultural heritage of the community?”
63
The
potential names selected by the committee included “John Adams,” “Benjamin Franklin,”
and “Presidential,” which were submitted by students. The name “Robert Freeman” was
also selected. According to the resident that submitted the entry, Robert Freeman was “a

62. Board of Education, San Gabriel Unified School District. “Report from Facility Funding Subcommittee
on Naming the High School.”

63. Ibid.

Mo’e’hahne 259
famous Indian artist who painted the mural in the San Gabriel Public Library—a cultural
gem for students of all ages.”
64
“Gabrielino,” “Jefferson,” and “George Patton” (who was
born in San Gabriel) also made the list.
65
The school board, however, narrowed the
entries down to two names, Jefferson and Gabrielino.
66
Up until this point, Indigenous
people or Mission San Gabriel had not appeared in any archival materials connected to
the naming. It was only when the voices of the local public entered the conversation that
the always-available Indigenous signifiers emerged. Indigenous people were represented
in only two of the total sixty-two contest entries, however, each entry made it through the
first round of selection. In the eyes of the nominating public, the Indian signs “Robert
Freeman” and “Gabrielino” equally represented the city when compared to the other
contest entries, which in contrast signified white, colonial, masculinity in the form of
colonial figureheads: Jefferson, Presidential, and George Patton.
The nominations committee eventually selected Jefferson and Gabrielino as the
two names that would put to a public vote. According to resident that nominated
Jefferson, she chose simply chose the name because it was the name of the old middle

64. The nominator, Jack Leighton Rugh, also included a short biography of the artist who was said to be
born on the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians reservation in San Diego County in 1939 and described as a descendant
of a Santee Sioux chief. The nominator also included an image of the mural, which depicts the mission, adobe
buildings, palm trees, Indians laboring in front of the mission and a settler riding a horse through the center of the
painting—and town—attempting to whip a bull. The submitter also included several typed pages detailing the
history of the mural and the Gabrielino-Tongva in San Gabriel. ibid.

65. Board of Education, San Gabriel Unified School District. “Finalist Names for New High School.”
Memo from Gary E. Gordon, Superintendent to Members of the Board of Education. September 27, 1993; Los
Angeles Times. “San Gabriel Clinton Not on This Ballot.” July 8, 1993.

66. Board of Education, San Gabriel Unified School District. “Finalist Names for New High School.”
Memo from Gary E. Gordon, Superintendent to Members of the Board of Education. September 27, 1993. Board of
Education, San Gabriel Unified School District. “Regular Session Meeting Minutes.” September 27, 1993.

Mo’e’hahne 260
school that the new high school would be replacing geographically.
67
By offering up
Gabrielino and Jefferson as the only two final options, the school board effectively gave
the residents no choice: either the name of the old school or Gabrielino. Arlene Duncan,
the resident who nominated Gabrielino, simply wrote:
I am choosing the name Gabrielino High School to honor those earliest
inhabitants of San Gabriel. We know they were skilled in basketry, traded
peacefully with neighbors, and used their resources carefully. The name
Gabrielino High School will be a most unique and appropriate one for our new
school.
68

As a visual text, the hand-written entry further inscribes the everydayness of Indigenous
figuration and narrating history through the figures of the school and the child. We can
imagine Duncan’s hand carefully writing each letter, forming the words, and building
each sentence as she precisely and yet casually drafts the paragraph.

67. “We are all used to it,” wrote Doris Bartlett. Bartlett also said that she had two children graduate from
Alhambra school district and that her family moved to San Gabriel because the schools were so good. “As a senior
citizen now on a fixed income I still consider this the finest school district and will support this new High School
project,” she said in a postscript to her typed entry.

68. Ibid.
Mo’e’hahne 261
Figure 11. “Gabrielino” Contest Entry, San Gabriel Unified School District (1993)
In a gesture that is characteristic of settler common sense, Duncan describes the
Gabrielino as the “earliest inhabitants,” thus, historicizing the Gabrielino-Tongva and
their relations to the land. The contemporary Gabrielino-Tongva, as an intact social,
political, and communal form, are elided as are the Indigenous residents of the city and
region. This figuration performs the rhetorical and ideological move that Jean M. O’Brien
identifies as “firsting.” Through a settler narration of place and time that declares that the
“first” Indigenous inhabitants have disappeared, Duncan tells a story of “lamentable
[Indigenous] extinction.”
69
Through this temporal logic, Duncan describes the
Gabrielino-Tongva’s admirable qualities using the past-tense form of to be. The
Gabrielino-Tongva’s abilities to make baskets, peacefully trade, and manage their

69. Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out Existence in New England (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv.

Mo’e’hahne 262
resources are relegated to an imagined past. Duncan’s text also enacts the settler logics of
disavowal by imagining an idyllic and peaceful pre-colonial and settler-colonial past.
70

There is no mention of whom the Gabrielino-Tongva might have traded with: the
Fernandeño Tatavium, the Chumash, Luiseño, Cahuilla, Serrano, or the Spanish,
Mexican, or American settlers? There is no mention of what might have been traded or
taken: crops, disease, children, women, lives? There is no description of what “using
resources carefully” involved. Could resource management be read as turning the lands
over to the colonists? Constructing the Gabrielino-Tongva in relation to resources
performs a key ideological function of imagining Indigenous people as once being
stewards of the land that is now rightfully occupied and owned by non-native settler
colonists. In theorizing the temporal logics of futurity, Edelman explains that “futurism
always anticipates, in the image of an Imaginary past, a realization of meaning that will
suture identity by closing the gap” between past, present, and future. In other words, as a
disciplinary framework, the future depends on the image of an imagined past and
narrations of that past as idyllic and worthy of repetition in order to justify the future.
Similarly, Lorenzo Veracini writes that settler societies imagine the past as devoid of any
violence and “disavow” the many conflicts and “traumas” of Indigenous elimination and
replacement in favor of a fantasy history that is focused on the image of a peaceful, quant
early settler experience.
71

70. Such short descriptions are a function of the fifty-word entry limit, but Duncan only filled half of the
submission page with her handwriting, which demonstrates that elaborating the history or context are not necessary
when practicing Indigenous appropriation.

71. Edelman, No Future, 73; Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 24-25.

Mo’e’hahne 263

Everyday Indigenous Appropriation
The names were put a vote, which was open to all residents. Gabrielino High School
received 327 votes and Jefferson High School received 241 votes.
72
Aside from Duncan’s
submission, the Gabrielino-Tongva are not present in the school district’s archival records of the
planning and naming process until after the election results were made public. “Gabrielino” was
simply proposed, selected for a vote, and then voted in by residents. From the naming memos
and their biopolitical and affective investments to the movement of Duncan’s hand as she pinned
the “Gabrielino” submission, each step in the process appeared routine and without conflict, an
everyday instance of civic politics. During each step, except for voting—where race cannot be
easily identified—white suburban subjects shaped the process. They oriented the school board,
proposed the names, and decided which names were voted on. White suburban settlers
determined the signs of the Indian that would mark the public spaces of a school that was to be
filled with Asian/American and Latinx youth.
Several days after the results were announced, the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribal Council of
San Gabriel held a public tribal meeting in San Gabriel. Tribal members “erupted in cheers”
when chief Anthony Morales “unveiled a sign proclaiming ‘Gabrielino High School.’” Anthony
Morales told the Los Angeles Times, “It’s a great honor for our tribe.” Morales continued,
“[m]any of those at Sunday’s meeting were elders who’d struggled for decades to gain

72. Board of Education, San Gabriel Unified School District. “Closed Session Meeting Minutes.”
November 22, 1993; Board of Education, San Gabriel Unified School District. “Naming of the High School.” Memo
from Susan Crum, Acting Superintendent to Members of the Board of Education, prepared by Jane Prendergast.
November 22, 1993.

Mo’e’hahne 264
recognition for our tribe. This is a major step for the indigenous people of this region.”
73
From
the subject position of the federally unrecognized Gabrielino-Tongva, the high school naming
might have represented a form of symbolic recognition by the local non-native community,
recognition that, at the time, they had not yet received from the State of California or the federal
government. Because of the ways that Indigenous people in Los Angeles have been abjected
from the colonizing bios and excluded from the (built) spaces of the settler-colonial city, the
Gabrielino-Tongva occupy a status of liminally recognized Indigeneity within the settler-colonial
order. When the Gabrielino-Tongva do speak out against the machinations of colonial
occupation, as in the case of La Plaza in chapter one, their voices are often ignored by the
colonizing hegemonies. Apart from serving as the “Indian cast members” in the local Mission
San Gabriel play, participating in the annual festivals at the mission, and attending and blessing
the San Gabriel council and chamber of commerce meetings, the Gabrielino-Tongva have few
opportunities to be formally and publically recognized in their homeland as a living community.
Their symbolic recognition by settling socialities on their homelands and within the spaces of
San Gabriel, therefore, often takes shape through municipal and communal gestures of
incorporation, or, in the case of Gabrielino High School, appropriation. However, in the process
of imagining reproductive futurity through the figure of the child, why is it that the figure of the
Indigenous emerges as a sign with the potential to identify and unite these affective attachments
and their related social orderings of settler suburban Americana? Aside from the curriculum, in

73. The Los Angeles Times described the Gabrielino-Tongva people thusly, “More than 700 Gabrielinos
live throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties, the majority in West San Gabriel Valley. The Gabrielinos, part of
the Shoshone Nation, met Spanish settlers in 1760s and built the San Gabriel Mission in 1771, taking the name
given them by the missionaries.” The Gabrielino-Tongva were misapprehended as Shoshones and credited with
building the mission. Los Angeles Times, “San Gabriel School Name to Honor Gabrielino Indians.” November 18,
1993, 6.
Mo’e’hahne 265
what ways might the pedagogical institution of the suburban high school instruct and produce the
student body as simultaneously docile, valuable, and Indigenous?

Symbolic Transformations at Gabrielino High School
Gabrielino High School does not circulate visual renderings of Indigenous people,
rather the Indigenous significations are textual and symbolic. Although the official name
is Gabrielino, the school uses “Tongva” interchangeably on school materials, murals, and
publications. The school mascot is the eagle. The school emblem is a fierce looking bird
that sits on top of a circle, or shield, with the word “Tongva” in the center; the emblem is
ringed by the bird and its pronounced feathers.

Mo’e’hahne 266
Figure 12. Gabrielino High School mascot, San Gabriel Unified School District

This representation transforms the figure of the Gabrielino-Tongva into an animal. The
Gabrielino-Tongva are, therefore, no longer human or are only capable of becoming
human in the form of the students who are drawn into and symbolically transformed by
the school. Students regularly cheer for the Gabrielinos, Tongva, and eagles at sporting
events, further illustrating the slippages between the Indigenous signs which have come
to no longer signify Indigenous people. The school newspaper is the Tongva Times. It
publishes “Tongva” news, such as Gabrielino High School students attending the January
2017 Women’s Marches in downtown Los Angeles and student opinion pieces on the
Mo’e’hahne 267
political economies of reproductive health—instances of the multiracial, “Tongva”
student body engaging the politics of settler sexuality.
74
Gabrielino High School also
holds daily “Tongva Tutoring” sessions, a formalized study hall where the Tongva
objects/subjects of study are not Indigenous lifeways. Instead, these Tongvas tutor in the
disciplinary knowledges that produce docility and aptitude in student bodies so that they
can be integrated into the settler political economy in order to one day possess the happy
object of the suburban home. For example, in the school’s 2011-2012 Annual
Accountability Report Card, the school’s “Discipline & Climate for Learning” is
described thusly: “The goal of Gabrielino High School’s positive discipline program is to
provide students with opportunities to learn self-discipline through a system of consistent
rewards and consequences for their behavior.” These everyday descriptions, however
banal, reveal that, in its various forms, “discipline” is a central organizing principle of the
pedagogical institution. Under the sign Gabrielino, students must be disciplined in order
to instill “self-discipline” so that they “develop a sense of personal responsibility” and
invariably enter the settler-colonial labor market as valued bodies of aptitude.
75

Patrick Wolfe argues that the logic of elimination is not only operationalized
through the necropolitical liquidation of Indigenous populations—as genocidal violence
or assimilation into the settler society—but also in the signification practices found in
settler culture. According to Wolfe, “repressive authenticity” is a discursive articulation
of the logic of elimination through the “romantic stereotyping” of Indigenous peoples and

74. “The Tongva Times,” accessed January 25, 2017, https://thetongvatimes.wordpress.com/.

75. San Gabriel Unified School District, “Gabrielino High School, Accountability Report Card, 2011-
2012” January 2013, 2, accessed June 20, 2013,
http://www.sgusd.k12.ca.us/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=579739&type=d&pREC_ID=1072099.

Mo’e’hahne 268
the appropriations and resignification of so-called Indigenous signs. The configurations
of discursive settler necropower is such that living Indigenous subjects and socialities that
do not match the idealized Indigenous type or the appropriated Indigenous signs
articulated by settler colonizers are, therefore, rendered inauthentic.
76
Because the use of
Indigenous names and images works to indigenize the settler polity and legitimate its
claims to the land, Gabrielino High School represents an enactment of repressive
authenticity that takes possession of the signs “Gabrielino” and “Tongva” for the settler
bios, while simultaneously transforming the multiracial student bodies that enter the
school in to the new Gabrielino-Tongva. The Gabrielino-Tongva always already exist as
possessive embodiments of settler reproductive futurity. Through the figure of the child
and the figure of the Indigenous, these complex discursive and biological relations of
settler sexuality allow for the possibility of multiple and overlapping transubstantiations
to unfold within the disciplinary spaces of the school.
As “Gabrielinos,” the community’s collective children are embodied by both the
disciplinarily organ of the school and the actual corporeal bodies of the students. This
formulation thereby transforms the historic and living Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva
people into children, who then become the rightful possessions of the white and non-
white settler bios and polis. This figuration extends the paternalist colonial relationships
that both Hispanophone (Spanish and later Mexican) and Anglophone (US, Canadian,
and Australian) settler colonialism and colonizing sovereigns have exacted and continue
to exact on Indigenous socialities, families, and children. For example, “familial”
relationships of colonial violence were first established in Alta California by the

76. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 179.
Mo’e’hahne 269
Franciscan padres who abducted and murdered Indigenous children in order to coerce
Indigenous parents and communities into servitude. The “Great White Father” and the
“White Mother” to the dark races
77
took the form of child abduction and “education for
extinction”
78
through the residential school programs that were wrought on Indigenous
peoples throughout the Pacific Anglophone settler colonies. These pedagogical
institutions were inaugurated by the eighteenth-century Indigenous carcerality at Ft.
Marion and through the subject positions of Indigenous students whose heads were cast,
collected, and exhibited (as previously discussed). US settler paternalism is also exacted
through the forms of governmentality and legal regimes that inscribe and delimit the
possibilities for Indigenous life, land, and self-determinations. This paternalism also
represents the very legal regimes that continue to dispossess the Gabrielino-Tongva, deny
their Indigeneity, and map the Los Angeles region as punitively non-native. (Such
paternalism, thus, exclude Gabrielino-Tongva socialities from the limited recourses that
are afforded to “recognized” Indigenous communities, such as NAGPRA as illustrated in
chapter one.
79
) Furthermore, the symbolic transubstantiations at the school construct
Indigenous people through notions of deficit, that is, as less than adult on the
evolutionary scales of human and cultural development. The Gabrielino-Tongva are,

77. Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal
of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2009).

78. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School
Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995).

79. For analysis of “tribal” recognitions by the US settler state and sovereignty see Vine Deloria Jr. and
Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1998); Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South; Joanne Barker eds., Sovereignty
Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). For analyses of Gabrielino-Tongva “recognitions” see Jurmain and
McCawley, O’My Ancestor, 195-202.
Mo’e’hahne 270
therefore, less than capable and in need of supervision and a proper colonial education.
The settlers thereby indigenize by positioning themselves as the parents of the
subordinated “Gabrielino” students. The settler polis thus possesses both superior claims
to the land and “familial” affiliations to the colonial school through its progeny. The
white colonial parents, however, are replaced by multiracial families in the spaces of San
Gabriel. Indigenous biopolitical replacement and its discursive analogues of becoming
the Indigenous form the nomos of the settler colony—a nomos which is only made
possible by the initial and enduring articulations of settler necropower, which are
structured by a logic of elimination.
Once the multiracial student body (which, in the Derridian sense, exists as an Indian and
non-Indian simultaneously) has been properly disciplined and oriented, each year a new
graduating class of Gabrielino-Tongva is created that symbolically and biopolitically replaces the
living, Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva in and on their own homelands. Through the free play of
Indigenous signs, the student-becoming-adult body can thus be read as a “Gabrielino” through
the local settler common sense, as an alum and citizen subject of San Gabriel, California.
Students have attended Gabrielino High School for twenty-three years, so the number of
Gabrielino graduates likely outnumbers the number Gabrielino-Tongva tribal members living in
Los Angeles, which are estimated at around one thousand or less.
80
For instance, during the
2015-2016 school year, Gabrielino High School’s 1,813 enrolled students surpassed the
estimated population of Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva. (This racially diverse population was 55
percent “Asian,” 3 percent “Filipino,” 33 percent “Hispanic/Latino,” and 5 percent “white.”

80. Jurmain and McCawley, O’My Ancestor.

Mo’e’hahne 271
African Americans constituted 1 percent and “American Indian” students constituted 0.3
percent.
81
) As the polyethnic, “antiracist” majority of the San Gabriel Valley displaces whiteness
by purchasing commodified Indigenous lands and staying put, they not only inherit and extend
the structures of white possession and futurity (re)established by US colonizing hegemonies,
they also enact and reenact the biopolitical symbolics of Indigenous replacement by allowing
their children to be transformed into “Gabrielinos,” practices that are disciplined by the cult of
the child within normative suburban settler politics.

Gabrielino-Tongva Children and Mission San Gabriel
Like Uncle Yu Indian, Gabrielino High School is spatially proximate to Mission San
Gabriel. The spaces of the mission, like those of Yaanga, are materially and ephemerally haunted
by the carceral trade in Indigenous bodies. An estimated six thousand Indigenous people
perished at Mission San Gabriel during its roughly fifty years of operation. The Spanish and
Mexican colonial administrators and the Franciscans padres kept meticulous records of
Indigenous conversions, births, and deaths at the mission. When the high school’s signifying
practices are read in relation to the necropolitics of Mission San Gabriel, what do the signs
Gabrielino-Tongva, child, youth, and parent signify in the spaces of violence that are the San
Gabriel Valley? And what traces of Gabrielino-Tongva life and futurity do they carry and also
foreclose?
According to the Franciscan records, women and young children had exceptionally high
mortality rates in proportion to their population at the missions. Women of child-bearing age

81. San Gabriel Unified School District, “Gabrielino High School, Accountability Report Card, 2015-
2015,” 2, accessed January 13, 2017,
http://www.sgusd.k12.ca.us/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=579739&type=d&pREC_ID=1072099.
Mo’e’hahne 272
were at the most risk of dying in the missions.
82
The Franciscans segregated the enslaved
Indigenous people by sex and age as means of carceral, social control and discipline. For
example, once baptized, children were separated from their mothers at Mission San Gabriel at
the age of eight. They were locked away “dormitories,” holding cells for the children, and
prevented from communicating with their parents.
83
This put an end to traditional forms of
communal child care and children where often left unattended in the crowded holding cells,
which the padres and settlers reported were filled with human feces. Mission officials throughout
Alta California “identified [overcrowding and] poor sanitation as…important factor[s] in the
high death rates… [in addition to] the practice of locking up girls, single women, and the wives
of absent or fugitive men in dormitories at night”
84
There was also little or no prenatal care
offered to pregnant women who were still made to work late into their pregnancies. “Children
were [often] stillborn or died shortly after birth, due to complications of birth or from congenital
illness such as syphilis.” Dehydration, that was the result of diarrhea caused by disease, “also
claimed many [children’s] lives in the first year or two of life.”
85
According to Robert Jackson
and Edward Castillo, “[t]he climate of coercive social control…also engendered a negative
psychological response among Indian converts and contributed to stress, which reduced the
efficiency of their immune systems.”
86
Oral histories collected from the relatives of the
Indigenous people enslaved at Mission San Diego also describe how children would die of

82. Jackson and Castillo Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 44

83. Robert Heizer, ed., The Indians of Los Angeles County: Hugo Reid’s Letters of 1852 (Los Angeles,
1968), pp. 75-76 cited in Jackson and Castillo Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization 82.

84. Jackson and Castillo Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 48.

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid., 44.

Mo’e’hahne 273
starvation locked away in the holding cells and separated from their parents, while their parents
labored in the fields and were prevented from feeding them. The parents’ labor produced enough
grain to sustain the mission colonies and to be exported to New Spain. Indigenous children thus
perished in order support the colonizing bios and the emerging imperial metropole in New Spain.
The multiracial soldiers, settlers, and their families and children did not experience comparable
mortality rates. Colonial settlers reproduced and lived to old age, as did the Franciscans.
At Mission San Gabriel, the Franciscan padres and the Spanish and Mexican soldiers
disciplined Gabrielino-Tongva women through institutionalized rape. This enacted a cycle of
sexual violence that, in turn, created new economies of Indigenous objectification, death,
“resistance,” and punishment. Jackson and Castillo write that Indigenous women at the missions
“necessarily became accustomed” to being raped by the soldiers and Franciscans. Indigenous
women’s responses to this sexual violence can be read into the recorded accounts of death at the
missions: “In fact, every white child born… [to the Indigenous women] for a long period was
secretly strangled and buried.” Jackson and Castillo observe that, therefore, [i]n addition to
attempting to control the mobility of converts and ensure they attended mass and worked…the
Franciscans [attempted] to control one type of behavior that had been labelled a form of
resistance—abortion and infanticide [emphasis added].”
87
According to Jackson and Castillo, the
Indigenous women were subjected to such labor practices and forms of “psychic trauma” that
they would miscarry the pregnancies which resulted from rape, losing the children whom they
may or may not have wanted to raise. The terminated Gabrielino-Tongva pregnancies and infant
deaths defy representation within the colonial archive as the subaltern Gabrielino-Tongva

87. Edward Castillo, trans. and ed., “An Indian Account of the Decline and Collapse of Mexico’s
Hegemony over the Missionized Indians of California,” American Indian Quarterly 13 (1989): 379, Quoted in
Jackson and Castillo Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 83.
Mo’e’hahne 274
women’s voices cannot be heard. The foreclosed Gabrielino-Tongva futurity embodied by the
children’s deaths are also forever suspended between the signs “miscarriage” and “infanticide.”
According to the Franciscans, abortion was also so commonly “practiced” at the missions that
further disciplinary methods were institutionalized to punish the women who “miscarried,” had
abortions, or reportedly practiced infanticide. However, the “response by missionaries to
apparent or real instances of provoked abortion,” write Jackson and Castillo, further “contributed
to the humiliation of Indian women, raised levels of stress, and only exacerbated the social
conditions that lead to abortion in the first place.”
88
The ritualized punishments for “infanticide”
that were carried out Mission San Gabriel were recorded by Hugo Reid, a German settler to
Yaanga that “married” a Gabrielino-Tongva woman in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1852, Reid
recorded her accounts of the violence at Mission San Gabriel:
Having found out the game practiced in regard to destroying the children born to
whites…when a woman had the misfortune to bring forth a still-born child, she was
punished. The penalty inflicted was shaving the head flogging for fifteen subsequent days,
irons on the feet for three months and having to appear every Sunday in Church on the
steps heading up to the altar, with a hideous wooden child in her arms!
89

This corporeal and psychic trauma was the standard punishment for “infanticide”/miscarriage
throughout the Alta California missions. After disfigurement, beatings, and iron shackles the
Gabrielino-Tongva woman was made to clutch a wooden Gabrielino-Tongva child, whose death
haunted the materiality of her body and being. This ritualized violence was carried out in the
name of and in the presence of the cross. The affective trauma of this embodied and psychic

88. Ibid.

89. Heizer, ed., The Indians of Los Angeles County, 87 cited in Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans,
and Spanish Colonization, 83.

Mo’e’hahne 275
violence also defies textual representation.
90
In the arcs of colonial violence that have been
narrated in the public cultures of occupied North America, Toni Morrison’s figuration of the
(dead) child in the novel Beloved offers the closest approximation of the transtemporal agony
that must have fused the Gabrielino-Tongva mother and child’s bodies at Mission San Gabriel.
Beloved, who is taken out of this world in the face of phantasmic colonial violence, comes back
to visit her mother and family as an affective trace of the after/lives of carceral and slaving
violence—through what Avery Gordon has theorized as the aftereffects of violence or
“sociological ghosts.” At the conclusion of the novel, after Beloved had left the non-normative
and manumitted family once again, they seemingly concluded that her presence “was not a story
to pass on.” So, Morrison writes, “[t]hey forgot her like a bad dream. After they made up their
tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw [Beloved]…quickly and deliberately forgot
her…Remembering seemed unwise” [emphasis added].
91
Such is the affective wake of the
carcerality that is bound to infanticide/miscarriage/and infant Indigenous death at Mission San
Gabriel. For the Gabrielino-Tongva women and families who were enslaved at the mission, the
(figure of the) child did not promise happiness to come, nor did the child embody futurity.
Parents could not possess or care for their children, who were locked away and died of
starvation. Indigenous women had no control over their reproductive lives or bodies. Such cycles
of Indigenous death and trauma are largely unnamed and forgotten in the public cultures of Los

90. As formations of violence that defy representation both in their very textual possibilities for utterance
and how they fail to circulate in public knowledge-power systems they resemble the “unspeakable violence”
theorized by Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández. However, these foundational forms of violence in the Yaanga region
have distinct ideological and material contours that can be further theorized through what I call the arcs of colonial
violence. Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping US and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2011).

91. Morrison, Beloved, 323-324.

Mo’e’hahne 276
Angeles, in part, because remembering these nightmares is “unwise” for settler socialities
because recalling the torrents of anti-Indigenous violence unravels the logics of colonial
possession and settler colonial futurity that engulf the Gabrielino-Tongva homelands of the San
Gabriel Valley and beyond. The violence practiced at Mission San Gabriel illustrates, as Jodi
Byrd writes, that the Indian exists as the “ghost in the continuing machine of empire.”
92
These
violences become stories that are willfully forgotten and not passed on; however, they are ever
present as social traces in the social fabric of Los Angeles settler colonialism.
Each year since 1994, the children that were violently forced into the Indigenous
Gabrielino-Tongva women’s lives and violently taken from them at Mission San Gabriel are
replaced by the new “Gabrielino” and “Tongva” youth that are symbolically produced at
Gabrielino High School. These new Gabrielino children are permitted to reach adolescence and
later adulthood by the settler necropolitical regimes. The high school, which bears the linguistic
and ideological traces of the mission, has come to replace Mission San Gabriel as the Gabrielino-
Tongva’s colonial, pedagogical institution. However, the institution is now tasked with
producing surplus and desirable non-native bodies rather than abject, objectifiable, and death
bound Indigenous ones. The bodies cohered at the new mission are granted the possibility of
futurity, entitlement, and possession both within and through the population and political
economies of suburban settler Americana undergirded by settler necropower.

Conclusion:
In 2013, in “honor” of Gabrielino High School’s twentieth anniversary, the principle
invited the “Gabrielino community to ‘Be Original.’” In the principle’s words, the “Gabrielino”

92. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxii.

Mo’e’hahne 277
community had “established the school as a unique place to learn” by “thinking outside the
box.”
93
The new Gabrielino community was oriented by the school’s new “mission” to be “Be
Original,” through “Pride, Tradition, Honor.”
Figure 13. Gabrielino High School campus theme, 2013-2014, San Gabriel Unified
School District

In the settler common sense of San Gabriel, California and beyond, originality and “Gabrielino”
no longer signify the Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva socialities who celebrated the school
naming in 1993. The multiracial Asian/American, Latinx, and white student bodies that have
been drawn into the disciplinary organ have become the new indigenous. Rather than thinking
outside the bounds of colonial common sense, the non-white families and parents who move to
the San Gabriel Valley and send their children to Gabrielino High School follow the well-worn
paths of settler colonialism and suburban spatiality structured by normative logics of settler
sexuality and whiteness. By “staying put” and possessing their parcels of Gabrielino-Tongva
land, they come to participate in the anti-Indigenous violences of occupation and the discursive
appropriations that work to replace Indigenous peoples. Such anti-Indigenous violences,

93. “Principal’s Message,” Gabrielino High School.
Mo’e’hahne 278
however, do not register in normative racial theorizations of the Los Angeles region, even as
Gabrielino-Tongva social and corporeal deaths continue to haunt the spaces of violence that are
the San Gabriel Valley.
In searching for a name, the school board declared that the community and its children
were in search of “identity, heritage and purpose.” The white settler suburban hegemonies,
oriented by suburban settler logics of possession and the cult of the child, arrived at the sign
“Gabrielino” to fulfill their “purposeful” identity desires. As such, Indigenous signs came to
mark the temporal and biopolitical horizons through which the suburban settler bios would
“embrace the future.” The necropolitics that unfold in the San Gabriel Valley and within the
spaces of Gabrielino High School represent shifting configurations of the multiracial regimes of
colonial occupation, settlement, and futurity that were inaugurated by the Spanish crown’s El
Pueblo colony in the late eighteenth century, entrenched by Mexican occupation, and
reconfigured by US occupation and the grammars of racial violence and the selective
enfranchisements it has formed. These spatial and biopolitical formations continue to take shape
through and are sustained by the violences of Indigenous abjection, appropriation, replacement.
However, through the figure of the child, the replacements practiced at Gabrielino High School
transform non-indigenous bodies into those of the Indigenous.
Mo’e’hahne 279
Coda:
The Necropower of Indigenous Figuration: Settler Militarism and the Traces of Yaanga

Through reading layers of Los Angeles settler-colonial culture, I have sought to
demonstrate how fields of cultural representation function dialectically with settler necropolitics,
which are also comprised and enacted through an array of cultural practices. As forms of
epistemic violence, the animation, over/signification, and performance of Indianness remain
characteristics of Los Angeles settler-colonial representational and practiced cultures. Indigenous
people must be extinguished or biopolitcally absorbed so that their traces can be made to signify
the colonizing bios and polis, and their myriad of iterations. In the spaces of El Pueblo Park and
La Plaza de Cultural y Artes, the colonizing cultures of Los Angeles apprehend, abject, and
deploy the figure of the Indigenous in colonial origin narratives and sites of possessive and
indigenizing identification. Through The Exiles, Indigenous people are figured as part of an
escapist line of flight away from whiteness and hetero/normativity while they are also depicted
as out of place and failing in urban settler modernity. At Uncle Yu Indian Theme Restaurant, the
Indian is transformed into affective and embodied practices of settler commerce and Indigenous
consumption. At Gabrielino High School, through possessive suburban common sense, the figure
of the Indigenous is cathected to the student body as a means to indigenize the multiracial settler-
colonial progeny and replace generations of Indigenous children whose existence was delimited
by the mission slave colony.
Mo’e’hahne 280
The Indigenous figurations produced by Hispanophone and Anglophone colonialisms in
North America and their “inter-imperial”
1
collisions in Americas and the Pacific (which are
exemplified by the occupied and continually remade spaces of Yaanga) have also been
articulated globally by US settler-imperial necropolitics for over a century. Denise da Silva
argues that in the global north, post-Enlightenment thought creates racial knowledge through the
ontological context of “globality.”
2
As a material and cultural space, globality, according to da
Silva, is produced by European colonialism beyond the spaces of Europe. In order to construct
human difference, ontologies of globality fuse “particular bodily traits” and “social
configurations” to the different “global regions” that are populated by the “others of Europe.”
3

European conceptions of the global, therefore, transformed the others of Europe into what Sylvia
Wynter calls the “not-quite-human” and the “non-human” that comprise the “genres” of
humanity.
4
In other words, it is through the colonial ontologies and praxes of globality that
raciality, as a signification of human difference, is crafted—or, as Patrick Wolfe has observed,
“race is colonialism speaking.” However, since the early nineteenth century, the US settler
colony has emerged as a distinct colonial metropole, that is, a settler sovereign and necropolity
that is separate from Europe in terms of its population and political economies. The colonial-
racial knowledges crafted through anti-Indigenous violence in North America (upon which the
persistence of the US settler metropolitan order rest) have also been exacted on other “regions”

1. Laura Doyle, “Inter-Imperiality and Literary Studies in the Longer Durée,” PMLA 130 no. 2 (2015):
336-347; Mary Louise Pratt, “Language and the Afterlives of Empire,” PMLA 130 no. 2 (2015): 358-357.

2. da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, xix, 4.

3. Ibid., 4.

4. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/ truth/freedom: Towards the human, after
man, its overrepresentation—An argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003), 301.
Mo’e’hahne 281
and other subjected socialities (for instance, in the Caribbean, the Philippine archipelago, the
Hawaiʻian archipelago, central America, and the Pacific throughout the long nineteenth century).
Jodi Byrd argues that a mobile and “paradigmatic Indianness” functions “as a site of transit
through which U.S. empire replicates itself by transforming those to be colonized into
‘Indians.’”
5
However, it is through the vectors of US settler-imperial military necropower that
the presence of Indigenous figures and their discursive naturalization is most striking. According
to Achille Mbembe, the theory of necropower is best suited to analyze the propagation of
imperial “war machines” (which Mbembe argues resemble Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations
as both state and stateless actors).
6
For Mbembe, necropower describes the relations of killing
that characterize the endless wars of occupation and resource extraction in the era of the so-
called Global War on Terror.
7
In the pages that follow, I consider the global articulations of US
settler-imperial necropower, the figure of the Indigenous, and traces of Yaanga across epochs of
global, colonial terror in what can be called the long twentieth century.
According to Paul Kramer, during the US colonization and occupation of the Philippines
(1898-1913) the heterogeneous targeted Indigenous socialities of the archipelago were
interpolated as both “natives” and “niggers” by US soldiers and those engaged in colonial state-
craft. For instance, the most barbarous “so-called tribes” were compared to “the uncivilized or
semi-civilized remnants of the Indian tribes still inhabiting parts of the United States.”
8
During

5. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxi.

6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 222-243.

7. Ibid., 40.

8. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 124-130. White settlers and black soldiers from across the United
State colony fought in the Philippines, many from recently acquired or still (as it always is) contested space of the
Northern Plains, including Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Montana where carceral spaces of the reservations had been
Mo’e’hahne 282
the multiple genocides in the Philippines, US soldiers did not regard the work of killing as taking
human life, but rather that of taking the lives of “savages,” for, as Mbembe observes, colonies
“are inhabited by ‘savages’” that are not part of the “human world.”
9
Indigenous figures have
followed the US war machines throughout the long twentieth century. For example, in 1995,
Colin Powell, who would later serve as US Secretary of State at the beginning of the second US
Iraq War, testified before congress about the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. He summarized the
events as unfortunate yet understandable actions carried out by soldiers who were “stuck in
Indian Country.” True to the moralities of Indian hating, Powell continued, “I don’t mean to be
ethnically or politically unconscious...but it was awful. There was nothing but [Viet
Cong]…When you went in there, you were fighting everybody.”
10
As Mbembe theorizes, in the
colony there is no “distinction between combatants and noncombatants, or... between an
“enemy” and a “criminal.”
11
In the spaces of colonial terror created by US military necropolitics,
the “enemy,” thus, becomes “the Indian.” According to Stephan Sillman, the use of Indian
metaphors among US soldering subjects were widely recorded during the Vietnam War and have
since exploded in the orbits of the US war machines engaged in the so-called Global War on
Terror. These arcs of settler-imperial violence constitute new spatial ontologies and praxes of
“globality.” Jodi Byrd asserts that “indigenous peoples must be central to any theorizations of

carved out. These settler-imperial conflicts, in fact, temporally overlap as the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre
occurred approximately a year after the United State took possession of the Philippine Archipelago and began its
colonization projects.

9. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 41.

10. Charles Lane, “The Legend of Colin Powell,” The New Republic 212 no. 16 (1995), 24 cited in Stephan
W. Sillman, “The ‘Old West’ in the Middle East: U.S. Military Metaphors in Real and Imagined Indian Country,”
American Anthropologist 110 no. 2, (2008): 239.

11. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 41.

Mo’e’hahne 283
the conditions of postcoloniality, empire, and death-dealing regimes that arise out of indigenous
lands.”
12
As US necropower travels, engulfs new spaces, and marks the others of the US settler
metropole for death, Indigenous figurations follow as do the traces of Yaanga, especially in the
era of the Global War on Terror.
For example, on 20 August 1998, the United States launched an unreported of number of
Tomahawk cruise missiles at what the settler-empire claimed was a chemical weapons facility in
Khartoum, Sudan that was linked to Osama bin Laden. The attacks killed 11 civilians and
destroyed a plant that was producing pharmaceuticals for the United Nations. The same day, at
least seventy Tomahawks were launched on reported al Qaida training camps in Khost,
Afghanistan in the Pashtun tribal borderlands. The Tomahawks fired into Afghanistan, some of
which were launched from Los Angeles class attack submarines, killed an unknown number of
Salafist Jihadists who were previously armed and trained by the US. The attack in Afghanistan
reportedly missed bin Laden by several hours. President Bill Clinton authorized the attacks in
retaliation for the 7 August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and
Nairobi, Kenya that killed 224 people and wounded over 4,000—the majority of whom where
citizens of the respective nations. The embassy bombings were carried out by the Egyptian
Islamic Jihad and, in part, organized by al Qaida. The embassies were subsequently bombed in
retaliation for the US extradition and torture of members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, in
addition to decades of US petro-imperialism and military occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.
As Achille Mbembe argues, the “death worlds” created by US extractive imperialism, colonial
occupation, and extra-legal violence defy what Giorgio Agamben calls “the state of exception.”
In the globality of US colonialism, “extra-legal” violence is the nomos not the exception. As the

12. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xiv.
Mo’e’hahne 284
1998 episode demonstrates, this nomos of violence reverberates as cycles of terror in the form
US renditions and torture, the bombings of the US embassies, civilian murders, and then more
US murders of civilians. In the cotemporary moment, this political and corporeal violence is
enacted by both nation-state aligned war machines, the others of Europe, and the global others of
the US settler metropole, relations of force that are violently forged through the continual
occupation of Indigenous homelands and the abjection of Indigenous lifeworlds in occupied
North America.
Twelve years after the Clinton regime launched Tomahawks into Sudan and Afghanistan,
bin Laden’s killing would be target codenamed “Geronimo” by US war machines, representing
yet another death-bound Indigenous figuration articulated through the violent grammars of US
settler culture. By becoming the most sought after death by global US necropower, bin Laden
was rendered proximate to the Chiricahua Apache leader that resisted US and Mexican
colonialism for decades, was hunted and imprisoned, only later to be photographed by Edward S.
Curtis (Geronimo’s portrait might even be for sale on Olvera Street). In late twentieth and early
twenty-first century, the Tomahawk cruise missile is among the most frequent and publicly
deployed instruments of US necropower globally. Named for the axe-like tool and weapon used
by some Algonquin cultures, the Tomahawk cruise missile represents but one sign in the long
chain of Indigenous significations that are connected to US settler-imperial militarism. The
Tomahawk was first used during the first Persian Gulf War (1990-1991) and has been sent into
Muslim majority communities and used to target tribal socialities globally ever since as part of
what Zoltan Grossman calls the US’s “global war on tribes.” This global war has materially and
rhetorically escalated since 11 September 2001.
13
Signs of Los Angeles, which metonymically

13. Zoltan Grossman, “The Global War on Tribes” Indian Country Today, February 15, 2015, accessed
April 10, 2017, https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/the-global-war-on-tribes/.
Mo’e’hahne 285
and materially carry traces of displacing and replacing Yaanga, also circulate globally in the
representational cultures that follow the instruments and symbols of death wielded by the US
settler necropower. Spread across the globe, Los Angeles/Yaanga class attack submarines remain
a source of death from the sky vis-à-vis Indigenous significations, the Tomahawk cruise missile.
The Tomahawks launched in 1998 represent but one episode of brutality in the arcs of US death
dealing, colonialism, and the subjugation of tribal socialities globally that has followed the what
Jodi Byrd calls the “transit of empire.” For example, in this wake, the USS Cheyenne, also a Los
Angeles class attack submarine, was one of the first vessels to launch Tomahawks into Iraq
during the 2003 US invasion.
14
The targeted spaces of Iraq would later be remapped as “Injun
Country”
15
by occupying US military personnel. A sizable portion of the necro-economies that
support US settler-imperial war machines have also been produced through the aerospace-
defense industries of occupied Yaanga, industries that have for instance produced Cheyenne,
Iroquois, and, of course, Apache helicopters.
As the Indigenous significations cathected to US militarism evidence, the category, sign,
and trace of the Indigenous becomes a vector through which US settler-imperial violence is
reproduced globally. Unlike other forms of racialized abjection that are produced by settler-
colonial necropolitical hierarchies, the figure of the Indigenous always already exist as a
potential site of transformation and metamorphosis, even as Indigenous figures are already
positioned proximate to death. Weaponized Indigenous figurations represent the Janus-faced
character of US settler necropolitics whereby the colonizing bios must eliminate the Indigenous
in order to become the Indigenous. Thousands of Indigenous people have served in the US

14. The USS Cheyenne, named for Cheyenne, Wyoming yet another re/signification of settler Indigenous
appropriation and spatial praxes.

15. Sillman, “The ‘Old West’ in the Middle East,” 339.
Mo’e’hahne 286
military over the past two centuries, for instance, as scouts and later “code-takers” globally since
the Spanish-American War in the Caribbean and the Philippines, while tens of thousands served
throughout the long twentieth century.
16
Non-native US soldiering subjects, however, have also
been known to play Indian.
Published in 2004, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America
and the New Face of American War is Evan Wright’s “non-fiction” account of his “imbedded
reporting” with a Marine reconnaissance platoon during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The book
was adapted into an HBO mini-series of the same name in 2008. In the book and mini-series, the
figure of the Indigenous takes the form of a Mexican/American soldier, Sergeant Antonio
Espera, who hails from Los Angeles and claims American Indian ancestry. Throughout
Generation Kill, Wright returns to the politically charged conversations that Espera has about
colonial violence and Indigenous abjection with his largely white counterparts (there is, however,
one African/American solider in the platoon). The narrative repeatedly transits Espera as means
of demonstrating how the soldiers share downtime, as they eat or wait, and discuss racial politics.
In one such episode, Espera reflects on the Disney animated feature Pocahontas (1995) while the
platoon is seated on the ground enjoying a “special breakfast” of “lentil stew and rice” that their
white platoon leader had procured for them—the edible bounties of some occupied land.
Addressing the group, Espera explains: “Dog, before we came over here I watched Pocahontas
with my eight-year-old daughter. Disney has taken my heritage as an American Indian and

16. Vincent Schilling, “Natives & the Military: 10 Facts You Might Not Know,” Indian Country Today,
January 9, 2014, accessed April 10, 2017, https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/veterans/natives-the-
military-10-facts-you-might-not-know/; Allison R. Bernstein, American Indians and World War II: Toward a New
Era in Indian Affairs. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Kramer, The Blood of Government.

Mo’e’hahne 287
fucked it up with this typical American white-boy formula.”
17
Colbert, a white solder, responds:
“Pocahontas. Wonderful children’s cartoon...I like the music.” Espera continues:
Dog, Pocahontas is another case of your people shitting on mine. What’s the true story of
Pocahontas? White boys come to the new land, deceive a corrupt Indian chief, kill ninety
percent of the men and rape all the women. What does Disney do? They make this
tragedy, the genocide of my people, into a love story with a singing raccoon. I ask you,
would the white man make a love story about Auschwitz where a skinny-ass inmate
falls in love with a guard, with a singing raccoon and dancing swastikas? Dog, I was
ashamed for my daughter to see this.
18

There are traces of truth in the Indigenous figuration of Espera (as well as “Remnants of
Auschwitz”).
19
The character shares pointed readings of the genocidal violence reimagined and
glossed over in Disney’s filmic worlds. Pocahontas is, after all, premised on Anglophone tropes
of colonial conquest and the denigration of the Indigenous woman, who, as Rayna Green argues,
symbolizes Indigenous homelands and by falling in love with the white colonists invites (further)
settler-colonial occupation. As a pedagogical text of settler American, Pocahontas works to
discipline children’s understandings of Indigenous life and colonial occupation. Espera,
however, calls attention the genocidal violence eclipsed in Pocahontas through the logic of
competing genocides by invoking the Jewish Holocaust and the spaces of the concentration
camp.
What is striking about Espera’s figuration in Generation Kill are the ways that his voice
is used in the narrative. Speaking from a liminal position of Indigenous abjection and animated
by the colonial affects it produces, Espera is the only subject that is permitted to openly critique
US colonial violence. Such Indian figurations are not novel in Anglophone Euroamerican

17. Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American
War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004). 193.
18. Ibid.

19 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.

Mo’e’hahne 288
colonial culture. For example, as Philip Deloria has shown, early colonial praxes of Indian play,
which predated the Revolutionary War, were performed to fashion distinctly “American”
identities and refute British “imperial” domination. Indian play, therefore, became a way to
further enact the Anglophone settler colonization of North America.
20
In a similar formulation in
the passage above, Espera critiques the violence of US settler-empire domestically by identifying
injuries to his “American Indian heritage” that are produced by US colonialism and celebrated in
Euroamerican colonial culture. It is through this liminal Indianness, however, that Espera is able
to participate in US necropolitical colonial violence in Iraq, which as documented in Generation
Kill, includes numerous instances of killing civilians and non-combatants (in addition to the
waves genocide that resulted from the US invasion in 2003 and subsequent occupations into the
colonial present). Espera exists as living proof of US colonialism, the embodiment of an
idealized US warrior masculinity, and a willful participant in the continuums of US colonial
necropolitics globally.
In the space of his platoon in occupied Iraq, Espera is further confronted with narratives
of Indian killing. After Espera’s Pocahontas remarks, another white solder, Trombley,
approaches him and says, “[y]ou know, my great-great-great-grandfather was a mercenary up in
Michigan who had a militia where they’d kill Indians for hire. He was really good at it.”
21
Espera
replies:
[I]n the fishing village I’m from, Los Angeles, if I mention that I’m part Indian, most
white motherfuckers will bring up some great-great-great-grandparent who was part
Indian because they want to let me know that even though they look like white
motherfuckers, they’re actually down with my people. You are the first white
motherfucker I’ve ever met who’s said that.
22

20. Deloria, Playing Indian.

21. Wright, Generation Kill, 193.

22. Ibid., 193-194.
Mo’e’hahne 289

Espera represents Los Angeles as an Indigenous geography (a “fishing village”). However, in the
urbanized colony, if he mentions that he is Indigenous most white colonists claim that they are
also Indian through genealogical fictions that seek to transcend their whiteness. Rather than
reveling in tales of Indian killing, white settlers in Los Angeles seek to forge imagined trans-
Indigenous solidarities. Espera had to participate in the invasion and occupation of Iraq in order
to be confronted with stories that, however in jest, celebrate Indian killing at the hands of white
settler militias for hire (practices that resemble the government and privately funded Indian
killing unleashed on the Indigenous peoples of Northern California in the mid nineteenth
century).
After celebrating Indian killing as way to challenge Espera’s reading of Pocahontas, the
white soldiers then attack Espera’s Indianness, racial identity, and practices of racial affiliation.
Colbert asks: “Just what race are you? I mean, are you Latino, Indian or white? Or are you just
whatever race happens to be cool at the time?” The Indigenous, even when figured through
quotidian practices of Indian play, remains unintelligible to the settler-imperial subject and
within US settler-imperial cultures. Espera responds, “Shut up, white boy, and go eat a baloney
sandwich.” Colbert continues: “No, I mean it...Your wife is half white. I’ve met your friends
from L.A. They’re all white.”
23
Espera responds by considering his Mexicanness rather than
Indianness:
Bro, you’ve got a point...I’m afraid to hang out with my Mexican friends at home. I’m
afraid if we go to the liquor store together they’ll stick it up. My Mexican friends are
shady motherfuckers. No job, twenty-thousand-dollar entertainment system at home,
more guns than a fucking armory. The only Mexicans I hang out with are in the Marine
Corps.
24

23. Ibid., 194.

24. Ibid.
Mo’e’hahne 290
Once challenged by his white comrades, Espera’s Indian play ceases and the fishing village
disappears. Espera admits that he is afraid to spend time with his “Mexican friends at home” out
of fear that they are violent criminals. His Indian/racial play morphs into abjecting
Mexican/Americans through racist tropes of unproductivity, crime, and violence. In the spaces of
Yaanga, after the Indigenous have been extinguished, the Mexican/American with “more guns
than a fucking armory” becomes the domestic threat in the settler cosmopole. For the members
of the platoon and author Evan Wright, Espera’s critiques of US anti-Indigenous violence serve
to deflect attention from the ongoing violence that the soldiers are enacting in Iraq. The Indian
from Los Angeles, animated by Espera’s Indian play and racial shape shifting into whiteness,
provides an affective orientation for the multiracial platoon’s ambivalences and perhaps anxieties
about the colonial war they are waging and the war machine that they are a part of.
Wright acknowledges the ironies of Espera’s Indianness as he simultaneously critiques
and advocates US settler-empire. For example, Wright observes:
Despite Espera’s harsh critique of the white man—he derides English as the “master’s
language”—his worldview reflects his self-avowed role as servant in the white man’s
empire, a job he seems to relish with equal parts pride, cynicism and self-loathing.

Espera is a harsh critic of the “white man” yet continues to relish his “role as servant in the white
man’s empire” with “equal parts pride, cynicism and self-loathing.” Wright then describes how
Espera imagines US empire making and necropolitics should proceed:

The U.S. should just go into all these countries, here [Iraq] and in Africa, and set up an
American government and infrastructure—with McDonald’s, Starbucks, MTV—then just
hand it over. If we have to kill a hundred thousand to save twenty million, it’s worth it.
[He lights a cigar.] Hell, the U.S. did it at home for two hundred years—killed Indians,
used slaves, exploited immigrant labor to build a system that’s good for everybody today.
What does the white man call it? ‘Manifest Destiny.’
25

25. Ibid, 230-231.
Mo’e’hahne 291
Espera advocates for the re-colonization of the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and Africa
through US necropolitics, governmentality, and the installation of US settler-imperial political
economies, epitomized by McDonald’s, Starbucks, and MTV. Espera compares the US invasion
of Iraq (and the future global US colonizations) to the white-supremacist “Manifest Destiny” that
engulfs North America through Indigenous elimination and slavery, African chattel slavery, and
racialized necropolitical hierarchies. For the Indian playing, Mexican/American of Los Angeles,
US colonialism is justified because it created “a system that’s good for everybody today.”
Figure 16. Sergeant Antonio Espera, Generation Kill (2008)

Generation Kill’s transmedial Indigenous figurations serve to deflect the narrative and its
characters from the death worlds they are creating by critiquing “domestic” articulations of US
empire in North America. However, the Indian from the “fishing village” of Los
Angeles/Yaanga eventually connects the necropolitics in Iraq to the regimes of Indigenous
elimination in the North America. Rather than marshaling this comparison to deride the invasion
of Iraq, the Indian calls for US colonialism to be expanded globally. A similar soliloquy
delivered by Espera opens the HBO adaptation of Generation Kill. In the scene Espera looks out
Mo’e’hahne 292
into the deserts of Kuwait, filled with the ruins of war machines from the first Persian Gulf War,
as the US war machines are staging their second invasion of Iraq. Espera tells a white soldier,
“it’s density dog, white man’s gotta rule the world.” In Generation Kill, the liminal Indigenous
subject becomes as a floating signifier, whose form and content are pliable and often
contradictory. The infinite meanings created through the free play of Indigenous signs in the
settler-colonial cultures of Los Angeles and beyond continue to enact new violences as they
follow US necropower and the spaces of death created in its global wake.

Mo’e’hahne 293
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Asset Metadata

Creator Mo'e'hahne, Ho'esta (author)

Core Title Spaces of violence: indigenous figuration and Los Angeles colonial culture

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 02/03/2019

Defense Date 05/11/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag El Pueblo Park,Gabrielino High School,Gabrielino-Tongva,gender,indigeneity,indigenous critical theory,Los Angeles,Mission San Gabriel,necropolitics,OAI-PMH Harvest,San Gabriel Valley,settler colonialism,sexuality,The Exiles

Language English

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