Allotment Stories: Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Joseph M. Pierce

“White people passed laws specifically in order to take away this land from our people. And then we did these other things in order to try to survive.” ALLOTMENT STORIES is a volume that collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance, highlighting how Indigenous peoples have consistently engaged creativity to sustain collective ties, kinship relations, and cultural commitments in the face of land privatization. Two contributors to this volume, Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Joseph M. Pierce, are here to share their pieces of this history.

Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini) is an artist, educator, and PhD candidate in Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, nitspu tititʸu tsʔitɨnɨ patwin, in the unceded homeland of the Patwin-speaking people (unratified Treaty “J” region).

Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) is associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890–1910 and, with S.J Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent), cocurator of the Indigenous-led performance series Knowledge of Wounds.

ALLOTMENT STORIES: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege is a collection of essays edited by Daniel Heath Justice and Jeani O’Brien. More info: z.umn.edu/allotmentstories.