Postcolonialism and native American geographies: the letters of Rosalie La Flesche Farley,1896-1899

Abstract

As the privileged daughter of the last traditional chief of the Omaha Indians, Rosalie La Flesche Farley acted as business manager for the Omaha during a period of changing land tenure and scandalous land loss. The letters I examine here discuss the spaces of colonial relations into which Rosalie was tied during the allotment, selling, and leasing of Omaha land in the late nineteenth century. While there is an acknowledged ‘problem’ with a postcolonial interpretation of US historical geography, a postcolonial analysis of Rosalie’s writing allows for a measure of understanding about the numerous conflicting, obviously distraught, but ultimately personally advantageous spaces of ‘Indianness’ she occupied. The gendered and racialized spaces and subjectivities she occupied were products of American colonialism and her strategies of survival within it.