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)
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