Mark My Words

"Mark My Words is a sophisticated, significant, and exceedingly original examination of the complex ways in which Native women’s poetry and prose reveal settler colonialism in North America as an enduring form of gendered spatial violence and imagine alternatives to such violence. Mishuana Goeman provides beautifully elaborated, historically and theoretically informed, and stunning close readings of literary works by Native women spanning the twentieth century."—Jodi Kim, University of California, Riverside

"Mishuana Goeman breaks new theoretical and methodological ground through her conceptualization of gendered spatial geographies and cartographies. As such, this book makes a timely and important contribution to current theorizing about space and place."—Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Queensland University of Technology

"The strongest contribution of Mark My Words is the emphasis on the process by which places are made and constructed, rather than on the materiality of the land on which people act. This allows Goeman to identify the ways decolonized spatial knowledges are created. In so doing, Goeman insightfully demonstrates that decolonization is a multifaceted process, as opposed to a single discrete moment or strategy."—Wicazo Sa Review

"What Goeman offers is a geographical analysis of Native women’s literature from outside geography."—Journal of Historical Geography

"Mishuana Goeman’s long-awaited exploration of cultural, social, and literary spatial constructions is punctuated by personally experienced geographies as it applies an indigenous feminist lens to (re)map colonial landscapes. Her analysis strategically moves through and remaps history and policies by marking Native women’s literary responses to these ongoing relationships between individuals, nations, and the land. Mark My Words provides a necessary addition to the study of American and global relationships, and the land we share. Most importantly, however, the text offers a compelling map towards global decolonization."—American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"Its strength lies in the sophistication and depth with which it sustains [engagement with high geographical theory], and in the inclusion of a well-chosen set of primary readings and real-world examples of policies and practices of colonization and exclusion against which North American Natives are compelled to resist."—Cartographica

"Essential for anyone concerned with education in Hawai’i.  A hopeful, successful, and concrete example of what Indigenous education can accomplish."—Hawaiian Journal of History

"Goeman challenges the pervasive myth of the disappearing Indian by demonstrating that both the peoples and geographies foundational to Native communities have not disappeared but “are waiting to be remapped and ‘grasped.’""—Canadian Literature

"Mark My Words is an astute, productive analysis that will prove enormously useful to scholars in Native American studies, social geograpaphy, and English literature."—SAIL

"Goeman clearly demonstrates the necessity of combining multiple critical approaches in order to understand the ways that literature can empower us to remap the world."—American Indian Quarterly

"Eloquent, compelling, and unique."—NAIS

"A thoughtful and carefully constructed argument about the power of imagination and the tremendous value of reimagining colonial spatialities."—MELUS

"Connecting state spatial violence with interpersonal violence, Goeman seeks out texts that rearticulate spatial relations, point out the spatial injustices of settler colonialism, document the history of Native women’s refusal to be erased, remind us that colonialism was and is gendered, and show how Native women 'produces places of their own making that are vital to Native communities.'"—American Quarterly