Challenging Racialized Space/Spatialized Race: The Sublime Speaks

Lisa Schilz“Challenging Racialized Space/Spatialized Race: The Sublime Speaks” University of California, Santa CruzIn 1820, the Cass Expedition canoed into upper Michigan Territory into the heart of Ojibwe power, Sault... [ view full abstract ]

Lisa Schilz

“Challenging Racialized Space/Spatialized Race: The Sublime Speaks”

University of California, Santa Cruz

In 1820, the Cass Expedition canoed into upper Michigan Territory into the heart of Ojibwe power, Sault Ste. Marie, a geographically-isolated territory which the U.S. hoped to acquire due to its strategic positionality amongst indigenous tribes. Famed ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft participated in this expedition, helping to subdue this “dangerous” and sublime space in the U.S. national imaginary through his writings. While Schoolcraft originally locates the terror of the sublime in the natural climate, another terror emerges—that of the dark body of the Indian—both of which he attempts to subdue through white, masculinized rationality, the essence of the Kantian sublime. Yet, for Schoolcraft, the Sault does not remain subdued for long, as the sublime—his Ojibwe wife Jane Johnston—speaks back through her poetry and stories, challenging his suppositions both of her native climate and her native body through a reinvention of sublime aesthetics. Schoolcraft responds, this time changing his subdual strategies from the Kantian sublime to botanical metaphors of grafting in order to silence his wife’s voice. Grafting, a type of asexual propagation, eerily shares similarities with later 20^th century eugenicist policies, particularly those of French eugenicist Réne Martial. Yet Johnston again speaks back, offering a different botanical metaphor with which to assert and value her indigenous voice. While Schoolcraft racializes the space of the Sault and spatializes the indigenous body throughout the aesthetic of the sublime, Johnston consistently challenges his conclusions, reinscribing indigenous sovereignty and agency back into her land of the Sault.