ABSTRACT
In the first decades of the twentieth century, narrative experiments by Native writers, particularly with regard to fiction, often take shape around finding ways to respond to and imagine beyond what might be described as the form(s) of allotment. The General Allotment Act (1887), or Dawes Act, sought to break up Native territories into property units that would be owned privately by individuals and families, thereby fracturing and foreclosing Native modes of peoplehood. Doing so involved the deployment of a series of policy frames through which to recast the contours and character of personhood, placemaking, and belonging. We might think of such processes and administrative templates as allotment’s form(s). Registering the invasive employment of federal categories, Native fiction explores Indigenous efforts to wrangle with settler categories and their deformations of Native life and to envision continuing possibilities for worldmaking that exceed and defy those colonial frameworks. Native fiction during the allotment period, then, can be read as engaged in critical analyses of the dominant forms through which indigeneity institutionally is apprehended and managed while highlighting the complexities of everyday Indigenous life under occupation, thereby refusing reductive non-native conceptions of Indianness.
