Narratives, Otherwise | Page 39

History and Clementine Jessica Hernandez Fall 2014 Introduction In late 2009 I met Clementine and her family. It was not until four years later that she would tell me stories about her past, addressing false narratives that willfully deny that Native American people are still suffering. There is a disconnect between historical actions acted out or sanctioned by the US government that were in some way detrimental to Native American communities and the present suffering of Native American people. As Clementine tells me her narrative she is empowering herself by addressing her individual suffering and as a Native American woman and legally recognized orphan, she is also utilizing her narrative to achieve a broader purpose of reconceptualize contemporary misunderstandings about the suffering of Native American children. Throughout Clementine's story, her suffering is the most obvious in events that are the most disruptive to her life, events like her parents dying or confrontations with her abusive guardians but there is another type of suffering that is much more insidious. When Clementine suffers it is not through isolated events but rather a gradual build up of mundane events that emphasized lack of care and voice; her story has value not just as a personal narrative but as the story of events laden with historical baggage acting on the everyday life of a person. Framing Suffering In order to address conversations about differences in suffering and how they are produced, Elizabeth Povinelli addresses themes of abandonment and tense develops these concepts to understand questions around suffering. This suffering that comes out in the ordinary and mundane lives of people. Throughout Clementine’s story, themes of abandonment and tense are embodied. As demonstrated in Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment, tense is a tool used in controlling the narrative of a community, it allows the person narrating to determine how the narrative will be understood, with the subjects of the narrative either in the past, present or future; tense is the social narration which spaces brackets of social abandonment. In the case of Native American communities, the US government is controlling the communities by placing them in the past tense. Under such categories the options available to the people are dictated by social brackets of power instituted on Clementine and creating gaps in care that mark abandonment. Tense, as applied to Clementine, came in the form of court decisions that determined she could not be helped but rather controlled, and even before this as decisions were made for her grandmother that would ignore her needs and position Clementine’s grandmother in such a way that made abandonment inevitable; the court decisions and impact her are elaborated below. Abandonment refers not only to someone turning away from someone else, but as Povinelli explains, if anyone will recognize the suffering through the tense that is working to mask it. Clementine’s family had a history of needing to cope, in some way, with abandonment. Clementine’s grandmother is from the Yurok tribe in Northern California and her extra tribal adoption would impact the future of the family. Clementine explained that, Her parents gave her up back in the day in the 1950s, it was common for babies to be taken door to door and the person (who I’m guessing worked with a certain organization)   38