Solomon Islanders often refer to the idea that women may not, cannot and do not speak about land matters, and it is clear that the recursive constitution of property and authority not only sediments land control, but state norms and institutions, as (hyper)masculine domains. Yet it is equally clear that women do ‘speak’, and this chapter focuses on collaborative efforts to disrupt dominant understandings of property, territory and political authority and assert more expansive practices. This chapter argues that first, an analytical emphasis on state-sanctioned property reinforces the dominant portrayal of gender relations in the region, according to which women are silenced and victims of their culture and religion, and reproduces material inequalities. Second, the political strategies actually used by women, which appear to resonate elsewhere in the region, suggest that custom and Christianity provide greater scope to contest the terms of property, territory and authority than is generally recognised. This has important implications for understanding the ways in which property might be challenged and re-formed.

This chapter examines how a U.S. soldier’s sexual harassment prompted the enrollment of Kā tý Brown, also known as Catharine Brown, at a mission school in the Cherokee Nation in 1817. Viewed through Indigenous feminists’ theorizations of the role of sexual violence in settler colonialism, archival materials enable new understandings of the significance of the life and writings of Brown, one of the earliest Native American women to publish self-authored writings. Brown’s strategic and agential removal of herself from her harasser’s proximity became a foundational act in her development as a Cherokee leader over the next several years as she put her literacy to service in the cause of sovereignty. More broadly, the essay interrogates how a lack of scholarly attention to Indigenous women’s experiences of sexual violence has affected scholarly conclusions about Cherokee-white relations in the pre-Removal period and demonstrates how Indigenous feminist theorizations of colonial sexual violence must be put in dialogue with the documentary record in archives.

Louise Erdrich’s 2010 novel Shadow Tag, a story about an artist who obsessively paints his Native wife, emphasizes the connections among gender, colonialism, and representation at the heart of indigenous feminism. In the novel, this essay argues, the relationship between Gil and Irene, along with the ways that Gil paints Irene’s body, underscores the centrality of gender in colonialism, the ways that patriarchy has served as both instrument and rationale for colonial processes that carry particular consequences for indigenous women. The novel thus gestures towards the consequent necessity of feminism in anticolonial projects and scrutinizes the role of representation in colonial power and Native resistance. In Erdrich’s story, contests over power and possession unfold in part as contests over representation, and by illustrating the ways that representation is bound up with social power, Shadow Tag ultimately reflects on the political possibilities of Native American literature itself.