Kimberly Jenkins Marshall

KIMBERLY MARSHALL, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, received a grant in April 2019 to aid research on ‘Remembering the Boise Valley People: Representational Sovereignty and Erasure in the City of Trees.’ Sovereignty is a central concern for scholars working in Indigenous contexts’it even permeates literature on culture and the arts. And yet, while scholars of political/economic sovereignty have begun to understand it as interdependent processes of entanglements and partnerships, this project extended this insight to the realm of cultural sovereignty. This research studied the representational assertions of interdependent sovereignty in the settler-colonial context of Boise, Idaho. Due to the forced removal of indigenous inhabitants in 1869, Boise is a space characterized by remarkable silence about its Native past. Furthermore, contemporary assertions of voice by descendent communities, such as the annual Return of the Boise Valley People gathering, are challenging this erasure. This research studied the stories that Boise tells itself about itself: from the Idaho-shaped bumper stickers to the formal histories enshrined in the Idaho State Historical Museum and at all registers in-between. Through participant-observation at Boise’s annual events, critical historiography, as well as ethnographic interviews with Boise residents invested in social justice and human rights, this research documents the extent to which processes of forgetting and remembering can still neglect the building of strong, interdependent relationships with Native people, to the determent of interdependent projects of sovereignty.