UC Berkeley

Geronimo’s Ghosts rethinks the convergences of racialization and settler colonialism in the United States by considering together Ethnic and Native American novels published in the wake of the Civil Rights and Power Movements. Critical Indigenous Studies has understood Native American tribes, who generally seek greater political autonomy through sovereignty, and African Americans, Asian Americans, and other minority groups, who generally seek greater political inclusion through civil rights, to have incongruous and even opposing objectives within liberation and resistance movements. Still, many non-native Ethnic American novelists populate their novels with Indigenous characters whose presence configures their examination of the respective obstacles to political inclusion faced by African Americans, Asian Americans, or other groups. By examining these non-native Ethnic American novels through the perspective of Native American literary theory, this dissertation seeks to reimagine the coalitionary potential of Indigenous sovereignty and racial civil rights for advancing resistance movements through discursive measures. The conceptual foundation of my understanding of American Indian literary theory is the “Three Geronimos” motif in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, which suggests that Geronimo, whose 1886 surrender is often believed to mark the end of the “Indian Wars,” was never actually captured in order to assert that Indigenous resistance has carried on into the twentieth century. Through the concept of the medicine story, a story with the capacity to heal, I argue that Silko invites us to appreciate in Indigenous presence a potentiality for resistance and resurgence which is cultural or ideological rather than martial. Three subsequent chapters draw an Ethnic American novel into conversation with a Native American novel to illuminate how concepts of tribal sovereignty prove useful to non-native Ethnic writers because of the unique conjunctions of expropriated Indigenous land and exploitable enslaved, immigrant, or foreign labor under American settler colonialism, which give rise to diametrically opposing federal policies toward Indigenous peoples and racial minorities. This dissertation demonstrates not only how Native American literary theory allows for a greater comprehension of non-native post-Civil Rights novels but, even further, how concepts of tribal sovereignty that emerge from American Indian literary theory can be used to advance the project of civil rights, rather than, as previous scholarship has maintained, necessarily undermining it.