Histories in Common

Since its founding, the United States has colonized more than five hundred Indigenous nations in North America and dozens more in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Alyssa Hunziker considers how American imperialism in the Pacific—typically thought of as separate from the colonization of North America—is deeply intertwined with US settler colonialism. By examining novels, poems, and archival records, Hunziker analyzes literary convergences between global Indigenous communities, and uses an Indigenous transpacific methodology to examine how contemporary authors from Native America, Hawai'i, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and the Philippines reimagine and uncover their historical connections.

While the colonial archive has been discussed in both postcolonial and Indigenous studies, archives appear frequently in contemporary Indigenous fiction. Hunziker contends that Indigenous authors use literary form to emphasize seemingly peripheral, or “extra,” histories that have been erased from official US records. Using literary archives—like a character’s collection of calendars, a degrading film reel, or a discovery of unorganized notes—alongside discussions of institutional archives, the authors under discussion subvert Indigenous erasure by questioning how history is told, and which stories go unrecognized.