ABSTRACT
American outlaw narratives have often been strategically mobilized as a means of laying claim to Indigenous lands through the invocation of nationalist rhetoric and the administration of violence. Drawing upon several apocryphal accounts of the life of Belle Starr (1848–1889), the ‘bandit queen’ of the Indian Territory, Hunnef’s essay argues that outlaw narratives are as capable of challenging the nation’s claims to territorial or imaginative title as they are of asserting them. To elucidate this thesis, she examines three instances in which Starr’s outlaw mythos is expressed through the preparation, consumption, and ritualistic function of bread and grains. Inasmuch as these specific representations of food have contributed to the aggrandizement of Starr’s otherwise dubious reputation as an outlaw, the connotative associations between bread, home, and community, coupled with the novelty of a female outlaw, nonetheless subvert conventional notions of femininity and domesticity. Bread, in these instances, is a metonymy of alternative femininity and, indeed, alternative nationhood. As an intermarried citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Starr’s ‘communion’ with her neighbors through the breaking of bread situates the outlaw’s popular energy within the context of Cherokee community, thus challenging the privileged position of the outlaw in the US national imagination.
