ABSTRACT
Indigenous scholars, writers, artists, and activists have long understood that widespread structural violence targeting Indigenous sovereignty and self-governance also finds expression in state-sanctioned gender violence perpetrated upon Indigenous bodies. Though contemporary art, activism, and scholarship have recently forced these issues into public discourse, Native peoples—and specifically Native women—have long drawn attention to these relationships, at times to generate popular outrage and reform, at others to imagine radical, resistant, and even retributive alternatives to those available in popular discourse and politics. One early voice in those conversations was Cherokee writer, educator, and activist Ruth Muskrat Bronson. Building upon recently scholarly attention to her life, activism, and non-fiction, this chapter examines two remarkable literary texts she authored as a young woman at the Oklahoma Institute of Technology and Mount Holyoke College between 1913 and 1925. Drawing on the racialized and gendered conventions of the dime novel Western and the American gothic, “The Killing of Gillstrape” and “The Serpent” draw sharp critical attention to the complicated relationships between genre, gender, jurisdiction, and justice in allotment-era Cherokee Nation, laying bare the ways that settler law and policy function as instruments of state-sanctioned gendered violence on Native bodies and lands and imagining retributive resolutions to those conflicts. In their refusals of victimization and explicitly insurgent political imaginaries, both stories model two responses to settler injustice less interested in arriving at empire’s door than in kicking it in, executing the perpetrators, and burning it to the ground.
