ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies Thomas Nail’s ‘figure of the migrant’ as incompatible with some indigenous representations of space and time. Nail’s work is placed in the context of settler-colonial literary and legal representations of space, specifically in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 novel, The House of the Seven Gables. Drawing from the work of scholars and theorists Maureen Konkle, Jennifer Nedelsky, Nicholas Blomley, Henri Lefebvre, Vine Deloria, Jr. and others, this essay argues that Nail’s ideas are capable of reinforcing the kinds of settler-colonial spatial practices illustrated in Hawthorne’s novel and used to rationalize indigenous dispossession. The poetry and creative non-fiction of indigenous women writers Layli Long Soldier and Toni Jensen, respectively, are examined for their representations of space that confront settler-colonial violence to bodies and landscapes. Long Soldier and Jensen are read as examples of art that produce indigenous spaces and indigenous times by expressing ways of inhabiting, navigating and interacting with features of the physical environment. These writers affirm concrete connections between people, place and the past while resisting settler-colonial abstractions which dissociate communities from landscapes.
