The Limits of Shame: Indigenous Political Critique of U.S. Settler Colonialism
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Oskian, Giulia
Abstract
This dissertation examines the writings of nineteenth and twentieth century Native American thinkers in order to understand how emotions shape settler-Indigenous relations and how actors cultivate, respond to, refuse, and leverage intersubjective emotions for social and political transformation. Through historical and archival research, I locate multiple sites of political contestation to analyze the political form and function of shame, guilt, and other moral emotions. To this end, I trace what I call the emotional economy of U.S. settler colonialism: the production, mobilization, and performance of moral emotions that structure social interactions and orient political understanding of dispossession and its resistance. The core chapters center different emotions situated within critical moments in federal Indian policy development. In each, I examine how thinkers navigate the circulation of affect as power conditioning the terrain of contestation and the possibility of settler solidarity. Chapter I traces the relationship between shame, estrangement, and white perception in Jacksonian America. Asking how shame phenomenologically transforms subjects, I look to William Apess’s use of shame as a technique to estrange whites from perceptual comfort and social domination reaped from the color of their skin. I interpret his use of shame as a form of suspended judgment to illustrate both shame’s potential and limited abilities to relieve the settler and Indian from a sense of their antagonistic immutable identities. Chapter II centers land, representation, justice, and sympathy in the early twentieth century to conceptualize one product of the emotional economy: demoralization. Induced by responses to the ‘Indian Question,’ I argue that demoralization is a psychic state of shame developed through allotment, federal Indian education, and absorption into the white laboring class. I illustrate how these processes are a result of settler sympathy. I trace Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s critique of sympathy to unpack demoralization’s political ramifications for Indigenous peoples as well as demoralization’s relation to democracy. Looking to the social and political landscape after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Chapter III turns to the question of white guilt and its circulation during heightened public awareness of radical Indigenous movements. Through archival work and the work of Vine Deloria Jr., I show how guilt congests the transformative potential of solidarity. Problematic for settler, non-Indigenous, and Indigenous populations alike, all parties contribute to feeding the vicious recursion guilt reaps. Chapter V returns the question of the cultivation of shame for social transformation. I turn to the 1969 Takeover of Alcatraz as a site that exposes the materiality of sympathy as forms of solidarity. I use both archival material from the occupation and Deloria’s archives to suggest the ambivalence of shame’s political purchase during the Red Power Movement’s emergence. The conclusion briefly explores the life of moral shame for non-Indigenous actors residing in settler colonial states in the twenty-first century.
Recommended Citation
Ben Abdallah, Leila, "The Limits of Shame: Indigenous Political Critique of U.S. Settler Colonialism" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1153.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1153
