Beth Piatote is currently a Ph.D. candidate (June 2007) in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. Her dissertation is entitled Home/Ward Bound: The Making of Domestic Relations in Native American Literature and Law.
"Home/Ward Bound reads legal codifications of the Native American family in dynamic relation with figurative renderings of love, marriage, family, and sexuality by Native writers in the United States and Canada in the period 1891-1936. In bringing together the fields of literature and law, I investigate the ways in which indigenous legal concepts and metaphors are expressed in literary texts to variously articulate, refigure, and subvert political relations with colonial forces. Domestic relations serve as the locus of my analysis, as I explore the literary and legal functions of kinship terms, marriage contracts, adoption, and paternal/maternal relations between and among native nations and federal powers in the U.S. and Canada."
Beth recently received the Whiting Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities, 2006-07.
She earned her M.A. in International Studies at the University of Oregon in 1997 where her subject focus was Indigenous Human Rights of the Americas with a professional focus in Journalism.
Her research interests include Native American literature, history, law and culture; Native American/First Nations literature and federal Indian law in the United States and Canada; American literature and cultural studies; Ni:mi:pu: (Nez Perce) language and literature.
Publications:
“By Hand Through Memory: The High Desert Museum and the Haunting of the Plateau” Forthcoming, Annals of Scholarship
“Bodies of Memory and Forgetting: “Putting on Weight” in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead” in Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres, Vol. 15, 2001.
Panel speaker: Sunday, April 29 at 3:15 p.m.
Citing the Almanac: The Challenge of Seeing in an Age of Surveillance
Leslie Marmon Silko’s first novel, Ceremony, explores the transformative power of bearing witness as a tool to overcome, rather than engage, acts of evil. Her second novel, Almanac of the Dead, a hemispheric account of the colonization of the Americas, expands on earlier themes related to seeing. The Almanac demands that readers decode its complex, interwoven plots by learning to recognize signs of life-giving or destructive/evil force. The text is not solely concerned with what we see, but also with how we see it. The text associates witnessing with carrying the weight of stories on the body; therefore, witnessing must be an embodied experience. Such weight is regenerative and necessary for survival. In contrast, acts of seeing that celebrate violence—those acts made possible by the disembodied eye of the video surveillance camera or the television screen—will ultimately create a form of blindness and death. Through close readings of the Almanac, I argue that Silko’s mapping of the colonial history of the Americas is a useful guide for understanding genocide, violence, and warfare anywhere in the world.
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