Week 7 activity

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by bryan mckinley jones brayboy and jeremiah chin

Dressed in full costumed regalia—buckskin with fringe, long hair

braided into two ponytails on either side of his head, a bead and bone

necklace, and feather in his hair—Iron Eyes Cody paddles a canoe

down river. Soon we see garbage floating in the river next to the

canoe; the camera reveals Cody paddling into filthy water outside a

major, anonymous, metropolis. The water is contaminated; factories sit

along the water’s edge. As he pulls his canoe ashore amid garbage, a

deep voice explains the message: “Some people have a deep abiding

respect for the natural beauty that was once this country and some

people don’t. People start pollution. People can stop it.” The camera

focuses on Cody turning to look directly at the audience, stoically

shedding a single tear. This simple ad for “Keep America Beautiful,”

first aired on Earth Day, starring Cody, a second-generation Italian

American who passed as an Indigenous person, invoking an entire

history of violence, land, terror, erasure, and racialization.

on the development of terrortory

Pu b lic

D o m

ai n

23S U M M E R 2 0 2 0 c o n t e x t s

Deploying Indigenous imagery to guilt white colonizers to

stop polluting, the imagined lone Indian, feeds on assumptions

that Indigenous peoples are remnants of the past, erased from

manufacturing and modern urban life; a rhetorical and discursive

violence. Where did the other Natives go? What happened to

them? The physical violence that removed them from the land

or the narrative violence that removed them from the story (or

memory) reinforces the vanishing Native ideology—Indigenous

peoples are absent. Only the idyllic, imagined noble savage

remains. Genocide and colonization are presented as foregone

conclusions, not ongoing terrors; Indigenous lands as long ago

taken and repurposed by colonizers who fail to appreciate the

land aesthetically. Of course, this “progress,” with its factories,

cars, and roadways is neither preordained nor the apex of society.

Here, we want to reclaim the narrative, frame it in both time

and space, and suggest other possibilities.

Consigning Indigenous peoples to the past erases them

from the present. There are bodies of research, art, and story-

telling, showing how colonization severs, alters, and remakes

relationships. This altering of relationships happens through

fear and violence, deploying institutions, ideologies, and prac-

tices—like courts, systems of property ownership, and schooling.

Violence operates at overt, epistemic levels through genocidal

acts of removal and systemic murder, and at the seemingly

mundane deployment of imagery that enacts violence of erasure,

like Iron Eyes Cody’s single tear.

To highlight the interconnected violence against land and

peoples that comes from colonization, we frame these colonial

practices into a concept we call “Terror-

tory.” We define terrortory as: the lawful

use of fear and violence to alienate peoples

and land for power. A portmanteau of

terror and territory, terrortory inverts the

U.S. government’s definition of terror-

ism—“unlawful use of force and violence

against persons or property to intimidate

or coerce”—to emphasize the legal legitimation of violence

against lands and peoples. State-sanctioned violence creates

and maintains social structures.

Cody, as the lone Native, is part of a terrortory framework:

violence to the land led to factories that pollute water; violence

in the erasure and removal of Indigenous peoples from the

lands so that civilization could commence; violence in the use

of Cody as a proxy when there were unemployed Native actors.

The entirety of the scene is rooted in taken-for-granted violence.

Terrortory unmasks.

We emphasize a relationship to land that is not about a

superior claim of right or title; Indigenous peoples are not Indig-

enous simply by being the first occupants. They are Indigenous,

with a capital I, because of their relationships to the land. These

relationships are grounded in reciprocity and respect, stemming

from a relationship to a place of origin and the stories of how

they came to be. Relationships between lands and peoples rep-

resent how communities coalesce and connect to different lands,

forming connections that are reverent and sacred, and rarely

recognized by colonial laws like property or individual owner-

ship. Indigeneity centers the relationships of belonging, not an

individual as an owner, but in relation to peoples, place, time,

and others. Contrarily, terrortory is a relationship between people

and land grounded in domination. It centers individuals, present

possessory interests, and a conspicuous absence of origin stories.

Terrortory has many manifestations, but its logics rely on

the disconnection—obscuring the continuum of violence and

domination. In the 18th century, British Colonies would become

the United States. In either manifestation, colonial leaders placed

bounties on indigenous peoples, offering payment for scalps in

order to remove peoples from land, clearing space for the sale,

and theft of land by white colonists. Scalping bounties terrorized,

Iron Eyes Cody (left), an Italian-American actor who portrayed Native Americans in Hollywood films, and Roy Rogers in the movie, North of the Great Divide.

W ik

i C o m

m o n s

Terrortory is in the simultaneous presence of the imaginary Indian and the absence of an actual Indigenous person.

Contexts, Vol. 19, Issue 3, p. 22-27. ISSN 1536-5042. © American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. 10.1177/1536504220950397.

24 contexts.org

killed, and displaced Indigenous peoples for property, simultane-

ously constructing the racialized savage boogeyman “other.”

Violence is a means of possession/dispossession—terror-

izing and trying to scare away and remove those who would

contest colonial uses for land ownership. The land’s inherent

value becomes lost, obscuring the symbiotic and mutually con-

stituted relationships of peoples to land and land to its peoples.

History shows that both individuals (including corporations

and their workers) and governmental entities (including Con-

gress, the courts, and other agencies) have dehumanized land

and peoples through removal and disrupted the relationships

between peoples and place.

Today, terrortory is operationalized in the seemingly mun-

dane regulation of the hair of Black and Native youth. These

students are too often threatened with suspension or expulsion

simply for styling their hair in natural, culturally meaningful ways

that do not match generic, eurocentric, policies of hair and dress.

Terrortory also manifests itself in the explicit conflicts over land

and space. From North Dakota—where Indigenous peoples

resisting the building of an oil pipeline are met with physical vio-

lence—to countless cities across the U.S. where demonstrators

lawfully assemble to protest police violence against Black people,

terrortory is at work. Repeatedly, citizens are confronted with

state-sanctioned violence and terror as they gather to protest.

School discipline, corporate exploitation, and police violence

all are sanctioned by law in neutral tones, preserving a hierarchy

of power that prioritizes whiteness and colonial interests, without

having to mention either. Educators no longer follow the words

of Richard Pratt, to “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man.” Now the

violence is masked in neutral tones of school dress codes that

require “clean and neat” haircuts for boys, often leading to Black

and Native students being singled out, disciplined, suspended, or

even expelled for wearing their hairs in ways that do not conform

to white norms. This means Black and Indigenous youth are

removed from school and alienated from their Indigeniety—rela-

tionships to home, culture, and peoples—via racially coded, white

supremacist policy. Scalping bounties and dress codes are different

implementations of the same continuum of racialized, colonial

violence through alienation. Forcing students out of schools is a

means of control, reinforcing hierarchies of domination.

This special issue focuses on the problems of research

and deficit-orientations for Indigenous peoples. Terrortory as a

practice, is deficit-oriented; the presence or privilege of those in

power is rooted in the violent imposition of absence, or illusions

of deficiency. It is sustained through rhetorical and discursive

violences masked by neutral wording and assumptions about the

“natural order to things.” In the remainder of this essay, we want

to delve into terrortory by exploring how deficit-orientations and

frames are implementations of state-sanctioned violence and

fear, erasing the ongoing presence of Indigenous peoples, or

reinforcing a mindset that Indigenous peoples do not belong,

or all of these things.

behind iron eyes The so-called “Crying Indian” ad conjures a mirage of Indige-

neity—supernaturally attuned to the environment, from the past,

solitary, stoic, male, sad. The iconography of Indigeneity deployed

by Cody plays on the commonsense narratives of colonization;

assumptions about who Indigenous peoples were, and that they

are no longer present, while skipping over the legacies of violence,

fear, and terror deployed to remove Indigenous peoples. Terror-

tory is the simultaneous presence of the imaginary Indian and

the absence of an actual Indigenous person. Our focus is not just

the white western imaginary of Indigeneity that Cody represents

but also the simultaneous absence of Indigenous peoples. Cody’s

presence invokes the absence of Indigeneity, down to the fact that

he is simply, as Philip Deloria says, “playing Indian.”

The “Keep America Beautiful” campaign is a message

of a return to a past that doesn’t exist. This erasure is an act

of violence at the core of a campaign about the environment.

Factories and cities do not just appear by the waterway. They

are built on a foundation of genocide and slavery disclaimed by

later generations of white colonists since they did not individu-

ally remove Indigenous peoples from their lands or own slaves,

simultaneously denying and embracing the inherited benefits of

whiteness. Violence against the land is present and centered by

the visual cues of pollution; the violence against people, however,

is absent. Colonial progress creates a false dichotomy between

land and people. The violence used to empty lands and construct

factories is avoided, left only with the imaginary past of pristine

land, byproducts of modern industry, and imagined Natives.

“Keep America Beautiful” is a deficit frame rooted in terror-

tory; the veiled absence of Indigenous peoples is juxtaposed with

colonial progress to trigger an ethos of personal responsibility.

The PSA correctly observes that people can stop pollution, but

prioritizes the land’s aesthetic qualities over inherent relationships

to land, individual action rather than a systematic remedy. Keep-

ing America Beautiful perpetuates terrortory; state-sanctioned

violence enabled the cars, factories, and pollution, but law will

not stop it. Cody’s character is alienated from the land by pollu-

tion. In contrast the viewer is alienated from Indigeneity—“some

people” have a deep and abiding respect for the land, but those

people are not the intended audience. They are invisible; erased.

We emphasize terrortory as an intervention to common

sense assumptions about relationships between land and peo-

ples. “Keep America Beautiful” relies on Indigenous peoples’

erasure while invoking Indigeneity to respond to waste—an

aesthetic deficit—affirming the absence of Indigenous peoples

through the imagined Indian. By looking at these deficit nar-

ratives through the lens of terrortory, we look to the spaces

between the lines where relationships between lands and peo-

ples have been severed through legal, state-sanctioned violence

and fear. Terrortory frames how rhetorics of deficit—particularly

for Black and Indigenous peoples—both stem from and enact

colonial, white supremacist violence.

25S U M M E R 2 0 2 0 c o n t e x t s

deficit distractions Over 5.6 million American Indian and Alaska Natives currently

live in the United States, representing more than 650 Indigenous

nations. Indigenous peoples make-up roughly 2 percent of the

U.S. population. Despite the diversity of Indigenous cultures and

governments, Indigenous peoples are often framed as a mono-

lithic deficit, particularly the so-called achievement gap between

Indigenous students and White counterparts in standardized

testing. Deficit frames blame entire communities for disparities

revealed by standardized measures—overlooking problems of

measurement or intervening variables—to place the onus of low

standardized academic performance on youth and communities.

Problems of deficit framing for Native youth is emphasized

by conspicuous flux and absence from national testing—because

surveys and samples did not gather a large enough sample. For

example, the National Center for Education Statistics 2016 report

on the Condition of Education notes that, “the relatively small

sizes of the American Indian/Alaska Native and Pacific Islander

populations pose many measurement difficulties when conduct-

ing statistical analyses.” This conclusion leaves longitudinal and

contextual gaps in the data on Indigenous youth in primary, sec-

ondary, and postsecondary education. Failing to gather a sample

of Native youth is the simplest way of reinforcing absence—leav-

ing out entire peoples because colonization has reduced their

relative population. They are made invisible; erased.

In looking at the ways state-sanctioned violence alienates

land and peoples, terrortory is a reminder that attempts to

quantify violence, which must come with qualitative and his-

torical accounts to contextualize the numbers. Without context,

quantifying violence may elide the scale and extent of violence,

avoiding systemic implications. Violence, like racism, is often

wrongfully reduced to an individual act of meanness or aggres-

sion. However, both violence and racism must be thought of

multidimensionally; at individual, systemic, and epistemic levels.

Macroaggressions and microaggressions are interrelated acts of

violence that can have profound effects on peoples’ relationships

to land and place.

Another way of thinking about deficit framing is in the racist

stereotypes of Indigenous peoples: substance abuse, savage,

uncivilized, extinct, mired in tradition, unable to learn, good with

our hands, etc. In these deficit frames, the racist trope is in rela-

tion to whiteness—centralizing the colonizer in the narrative of

what is proper. These narratives and data can easily be debunked

with extensive evidence, but it is generally not the point. As Toni

Morrison explained in a 1975 speech at Portland State Univer-

sity, “the function, the very serious function of racism which is

a distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you

explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Deficit

narratives distract in order to preserve racial hierarchies that put

Black, Brown, and Red peoples in our “proper place” set out by

white supremacy and colonization. Deficit is linked to a hierarchy

of domination. Violence maintains the racial status quo, defining

belonging through the hierarchy that entitles whites, disinherits

Indigeneity, and displaces Blackness.

Deficit-oriented approaches to research are similarly rooted

in white supremacy, the result of policies and practices depen-

dent on violence and exploitation. For Indigenous people in

particular, many of these approaches rely on statistical absences

and erasures. Heather Shotten, Shelly Waterman, and Stephanie

Lowe articulate this as the problem of the “asterisk.” Because

Indigenous people are a small percentage of the total popula-

tion, and often a small percentage of any sample or study,

they are footnoted, asterisked, omitted, or otherwise placed at

the outskirts of research for lack of statistical significance. This

makes Indigenous peoples absent—decontextualized, eliminated

from coalitions for solidarity, and minimizes Indigenous peoples’

struggles and accomplishments in education. Deficit-orientations

are at best a funhouse mirror that distorts the experiences of

Indigenous peoples. At worst a shrink-ray that so minimizes

Indigenous experience that they become invisible to the naked

eye; erased.

This marginalization-through-insignificance perpetuates

histories of violence by failing to grapple with the underlying

reasons why Indigenous peoples are such a statistically small

percent of the population. At one point in the past, every part

of the land within the United States’ political boundaries was

filled with Indigenous peoples. Then 371 treaties, 5,000 acts of

Congress and executive orders ceded approximately 1 billion

acres of Indigenous land to the United States.

Treaties offered exchanges—sometimes land exchanges,

usually guaranteeing federal protection from violence and

encroachment, and including benefits such as health, education,

and welfare, in perpetuity. The Treaty of New Echota in 1835, for

example, was a land exchange between the Cherokee Nation

and the United States. After the discovery of gold on Cherokee

lands in the southeast, the state of Georgia sought to expand,

while the Cherokee Nation refused. Georgia pressed on, neces-

sitating federal intervention.

The United States offered land in the Indian Territory that

would become Oklahoma in exchange for Cherokee homelands,

President Jimmy Carter with “Iron Eyes” Cody.

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26 contexts.org

offering sovereignty and jurisdiction, removed from state inter-

ference. Otherwise, Cherokee would be left to fend against

incursions by Georgia on its own. Faced with removal, assimila-

tion, or outright conflict, a select group of Cherokee signed the

treaty, without the full consent of the Cherokee Nation. Terror-

tory alienated the Cherokee from their lands; alienation would

occur either by disavowing the Cherokee as a nation, enabling

assimilation, or by forced removal, or by removal by treaty. The

United States accepted the treaty as law, and President Martin

Van Buren enforced the treaty by forcibly removing any Cherokee

who declined to leave their lands, creating the Trail of Tears.

Theoretically, treaties recognize the sovereignty of Indig-

enous nations as peers with the United States—treaties are

agreements between nations, after all. However, the United

States Supreme Court has taken a unique approach to treaties

with Indigenous nations. Congress may unilaterally break, or

abrogate, a treaty because of its plenary power, according to

the Supreme Court in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock in 1903. While

Congress and Indigenous Nations mutually agree to treaty terms,

often under duress, Congress has the sole power to expressly

disavow treaty obligations at its own discretion—as Congress

did in Lone Wolf when it disregarded the Medicine Lodge Treaty

of 1867 by reducing the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservation

without treaty-mandated consent of Tribal members.

Just as the “Keep America Beautiful” PSA relied on nar-

ratives of Indigenous absence to overlook histories of violence,

treaties emphasize how fear and violence are legitimized through

the operation of law. The Treaty of New Echota sanctioned

the removal of the Cherokee, even though it was made under

duress. The Medicine Lodge Treaty outlined requirements for

the taking of Tribal land. However, the Supreme Court ruled

in Lone Wolf that because “Indian tribes are the wards of the

nation... dependent on the United States”, Congress could be

assumed to act in “good faith” when repudiating treaty obli-

gations. Terrortory centers the lawful use of fear and violence;

treaties legitimize the use of violence to enforce agreements

made between sovereigns. It was simpler for the United States

to agree to exchanges. It could break and ignore, compound-

ing the violence of treaty-making with unmet obligations and

responsibilities, rather than engage in costly full-scale warfare

against Indigenous nations.

Indigenous peoples’ marginalization is a story filled with

other forms of legally sanctioned, interdependent violences—

warfare, starvation, removal, scalping, and deterritorialization.

Physical violence initiates theft of land. Legal rhetoric legitimizes

the violence as policy of civilization or benevolence, erasing the

brutality of the U.S.’s origin story. Terrortory emphasizes that

these acts of violence—rhetorical erasure, physical violence, colo-

nization, and white supremacy—are all interrelated as measures

under the law to alter relationships between land and people.

The relationships are altered through the removal Indigenous

peoples from lands—both in the United States and abroad as

Africans were taken and imported in as property into chattel

slavery—and refashioning those lands through colonization and

property ownership into wealth and power for white Europeans.

Terrortory feeds deficit orientations by altering the relation-

ships between lands and peoples, alienating peoples from the

land by making land a saleable commodity (alienable) and by

changing the nature of that relationship by changing the charac-

ter of land and peoples to estrange peoples from places they call

home. Relationships change, shift, and are mediated by policies of

violence and terror that are weaponized through racial hierarchy

known as white supremacy and colonization. A core feature of

terrortory is extraction via terror—extraction of labor, land, dignity,

and even humanity from Black and Indigenous peoples. For land to

be possessed in the United States, peoples must be dispossessed

toward the ends of “progress” and material gain.

There is an inherent relationship between lands and peo-

ples. Consider our origin stories. Who we are is directly linked to

where we come from; where our ancestors are, were, or have

been. Land has inherent value, and that’s related to the people

who are from there, who live there, and have always lived there.

Peoples’ origin stories about their lands come from, how they

relate to that place, no matter where they are presently located.

It is a way of identifying relationships across space and time,

where you are related to where you have been, where your

people come from, and how they come to be there.

Consider, for example, Bryan’s people, the Lumbee, who

are tied to the Lumber River. That river has intrinsic value in who

he is as a person and who Lumbees are as a people. It feeds

and nurtures, providing water for farming and fish for food.

The river is a source of strength, lessons and cautions, and

inspiration for Lumbee. Stories revolve around the river. This

origin story is the basis of a relationship between his people,

the Lumbee, and land.

Even though Bryan currently lives in Arizona, his relation-

ship to this place is still shaped by his relationship to that land.

Indigenous peoples are grounded in the relationship between

land and people that travel with them no matter where they

go. Relationships between lands and peoples are harmed by

violence, fear, and terror as land is stolen, misappropriated,

and colonized. Land is dehumanized—as peoples are removed

from land—and the land itself is commodified as a transaction,

reduced to an extrinsic value that puts humans at the center

rather than as part of the larger ecology.

Compare Bryan’s relationship to the river with the “Keep

America Beautiful” campaign. Cody appears on a river, alone on

a canoe, to shed a single tear and encourage white colonists to

pollute less. This noble savage stereotype alienates Indigenous

imagery from Indigenous peoples—no relation to the river or

land, just the stereotype of Indian. The presence of colonizers

from Europe is dependent on the absence of the Indigenous.

Colonization is oversimplified, reduced to arrival and accumula-

tion—this rhetorical presence obfuscates Indigenous peoples’

27S U M M E R 2 0 2 0 c o n t e x t s

presence and theft of the land. The story often goes something

like: the pilgrims come to the land, make friends with the Indi-

ans, share a meal together, and then the Pilgrims thrive. The

Indigenous peoples are erased from the narrative after that first,

shared meal. The Pilgrims are present, and the stories remain

with them, while Indigenous peoples fade and disappear. Indi-

geneity is consumed, the land is possessed, skipping colonial

violence, terror, scalping, and expansion.

changing the terror-story In the 21st century, we see how people and property are

related through violence. Confederate monuments glorify those

who fought to keep Black peoples as possessions on lands taken

from Indigenous peoples. Land is exploited for use rather than

appreciated space sacred to Indigenous peoples: battles over

oil and water in North Dakota, uranium at Bear Ears National

Monument, gold in the Black Hills (because it worked out so

well the first time around 150 years ago), and the maintenance

of a telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i. Importantly, these

engagements around monuments and land are intimately linked

to the connections between time and space. The battles for

land, space, and people run deep in the U.S., particularly for

Indigenous peoples whose relationship with lands clash with

notions of White ownership entrenched in the laws of posses-

sion in the United States. This is still the struggle of terrortory,

where land is dehumanized through dominance, possession,

and control, while Indigenous peoples and others continue to

tell origin stories of self, people, and place that defy the frame

imposed by ownership, to show how they belong in relation to

others and place.

In its physical, rhetorical, and epistemic forms, violence is a

means of possession and dispossession—terrorizing and remov-

ing those who would contest colonial uses or ownership of land.

Dogs, water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas are used to

deter protesters—implements that are violent and potentially

lethal, like the police shootings, chokeholds, and toxic pollutants

protestors rally against at Standing Rock, Flint, Minneapolis, and

cities around the United States.

The talk of profit and the superiority of science or a par-

ticular narrative overrides Indigenous connections to land. DNA

testing perpetuates colonial definitions of race and place, con-

fusing relationships of peoples and land with biology. The land’s

inherent value is lost, especially in the symbiotic and mutually

constituted relationships of peoples to land and land to its

peoples. The presence of Indigenous peoples is erased. We

must begin to expand our thinking about violence and race in

relation to how we think about lands and peoples. Terrortory

is an organizing concept, to connect the various threads and

implementations of violence against land and peoples. However,

terrortory is neither final nor all-encompassing. Peoples refuse to

be consumed by violence and terror and instead respond with

humor and joy. Indigeneity, the relations between peoples and

land, perseveres.

We imagine that exploring the connections between race,

land, and indigeneity through terrortory will be illuminating

for Indigenous peoples and others. Future conversations on

water, sacred sites, and monuments, how bodies are engaged,

the (re)-writing of origin stories, and the relationships between

people and place—rooted in asking the question: who belongs

here?—will offer us room to stretch and grow. We also must

consider the multiple dimensions of the relationships between

land and people, noting the role of race and colonization in the

relationships between land and people means understanding

the ways Black, Native, and other marginalized people relate to

place, and what their stories look like in relation to the land and

to each other, and what colonial and white supremacist violence

has done to those relationships.

As we elaborate on this concept, we welcome an oppor-

tunity to think about the role of coalitions between those

marginalized and removed because of an ahistorical narrative

or through the legalization of violence. There is violence in the

physical attacks on peoples; there is also violence in ignoring the

sacred nature of land to its original inhabitants, in the erasure

of their histories, and in creating a sense of unbelonging. We

intend to explore all of these in the coming years.

recommended resources Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property” Harvard Law Review (1993), 106: 1707-1791.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. (Grove Press, 2004).

King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke, 2019).

Shotton, Heather J., Shelly C. Lowe, and Stephanie J. Waterman. Beyond the Asterisk: Understanding Native Studies in Higher Edu- cation (Stylus, 2013).

Parker, Arthur C. The Social Elements of the Indian Problem. American Journal of Sociology (1916) 22:252-267.

Berger, Bethany. Red: Racism and the American Indian. UCLA Law Review (2009) 56:591-656.

Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy is in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona

State University and Jeremiah Chin is at the St. Thomas University School of Law in

Miami, Florida. Brayboy studies race and Indigeneity in higher education, particularly

the experiences of Indigenous peoples in institutions of higher education and research

methodologies used by, with, and for Indigenous communities. Chin studies race,

law, and social sciences through critical race theory, focused on the uses of social

science data in courts and the overlaps between civil rights and Federal Indian Law.