June 2024 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act, which officially assigned U.S. citizenship to Indigenous peoples of the connected forty-eight settler states (Alaska and Hawai’i weren’t yet annexed). I use assigned because not all American Indians wanted U.S. citizenship since it legally foreclosed Indigenous epistemologies of belonging, kinship, and sovereignty. Two weeks after American Indians were assigned citizenship status, the Immigration Act of 1924 was enacted, limiting the number of visas allotted to migrants seeking entry into the U.S., leading to the formation of the entity we now know as “U.S. Border Patrol.” These acts marked a new legal regulation of Indigenous and migrant aliveness.

The curation of poems that follow rejects the notion that U.S. citizenship has ever been a gift. U.S. citizenship is a looming reminder of conquest, but it also begets attention to the quotidian ways in which Indigenous peoples are resisting and imagining alternative ways of living and being outside/in/through/against occupation. In this issue, Huizache celebrates Indigenous refusal, the active practice of rejecting the authority states believe they have over Indigenous kinship and Indigenous aliveness. Spearheaded by the work of Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson, we understand refusal as the declaration that Indigenous peoples speak for themselves/ourselves and say: “this is who we are,” and, we know who we are not (Simpson 2007: 73).

Inspired by the work of Yankton Dakota writer, composer, and Indigenous rights activist, Zitkála-Šá, this portfolio brings together six poets whose literary and political work are foundational to understanding the stakes of Indigenous and/or migrant refusals, as well as practices of being alive amidst the ongoing settler occupation and accumulation of land, water, spirit, body, and epistemes. As Diné writer and visual artist Demian DinéYazhi’ teaches us, these forms of refusal take practice. In the opening poem, DinéYazhi’ braids their hair for “days weeks months,” confronting a legal past of Indigenous children sequestered from their communities and sent to American Indian Boarding Schools where their braids were violently cut off. Through braiding their hair and rendering a photograph of their braids behind the text, DinéYazhi’ leans into the “frustration” of refusal. To refuse, for DinéYazhi’, is to attend to frustration, an affect that settlers have told us is bad, uncivilized, and unproductive. It is in this affect, which I refuse to name as negative affect, that DinéYazhi’ braids Diné and Palestinian aliveness together, drafting a constellation of Indigenous resistance across hemispheres. Most importantly, this type of braiding is not romantic; it is tolling and rare.

Braiding may be the best way to describe the methodology of these poems. By braiding resistance and refusal, each poet cuts through the circuit of domination that has gaslit us into believing in the power of U.S. citizenship. For example, Cherokee Filipinx poet and visual artist Zoë Keeler offers a concrete poem shaped as a cross. In “ᎠᏂ ᎡᎶᎯ,” the cross is fragmented by negative space, almost as if the poet has physically cut through the anatomy of the wooden object. The title of the poem, “ᎠᏂ ᎡᎶᎯ,” refuses English to also confront the illegalization of Indigenous languages during the assimilation era. Taken from a Cherokee translation of the Lord’s Prayer that was found on a Cherokee soldier in Manila, Keeler brings attention to the fact that citizenship for Indigenous peoples demands that Indigenous bodies become weapons for the state that claims to protect them. Keeler says No. No to the state. No to the cross. No to settler sins. Instead, Keeler says yes to herself/themselves. 

Keeler’s No echoes through Jennif(f)er Tamayo’s poem / performance documentation / alternative archive. In “Form N-400,” Tamayo takes U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to battle. By restructuring Form N-400, the legal document whereby residents apply for U.S. naturalization, Tamayo can be accused of falsifying a government form, thus making poetry a criminalized activity. This is conversant with Marwa Helal’s poem, “THE ONES WHO WILL NEVER ABANDON YOU WILL DIE FIRST,” which argues that “the poet is nothing but a broken thought.” Under the surveilling eye of the state, the migrant poet must be careful not to expose too many of their “broken thought[s].” As a result, Tamayo and Helal dissect and bring the practice of poetry and the role of the poet to question: is poetry enough?  Perhaps, this is why on the first page of “Form N-400,” Tamayo hyperimposes a photograph of themselves in a black dress with a headpiece that reads “NO” in huge black letters. Much of the poem centers on the legal treatment of migrant children and Tamayo’s “NO” demands that migrant children be given their childhood’s back. Tamayo’s “NO” communicates that USCIS, like the American Indian Boarding School, is determined to take away the radical imagination of children who have not yet pledged themselves to the United States. In this “NO,” the Colombian writer declares: “I want to belong to us / To us who refuse to belong to the Settler Colonial State.” And this desire is dangerous, for the poet can be identified as ungovernable and deportable. Tamayo knows this and declares, “Oh, I promise                                   To Remain                              Deportable (if applicable).”

The contemporary realities of migration and citizenship are psychologically tolling. In “THE ONES WHO WILL NEVER ABANDON YOU WILL DIE FIRST,” Egyptian writer Marwa Helal cannot remember “the BANANAS” because the learned weight of self-surveillance is all-encompassing. Coloniality depends on our second-guessing, self-regulating, and internalization of settler thoughts. If we do not do this, we become bad citizens. Naturalized citizens are deportable citizens. Deportation, however, has never needed a migrant subject.  The Trail of Tears was ethnic cleansing made possible by dispossession and deportation. The Fugitive Slave Acts in the antebellum era demanded the deportation of formerly enslaved people who escaped plantations. Deportation has never necessitated an undocumented migrant. Deportation has always necessitated a settler-occupational force.

Chinese Canadian poet and visual artist Jess X. Snow knows this all too well. In “Sometimes, I Dream of No Chinese Exclusion,” dreaming becomes a radical act that threatens U.S. citizenship. For Snow, to dream is to challenge the racialized anxiety of the U.S. government. The U.S. needs an enemy alien so that it can sell U.S. citizenship as necessary. Through many historical moments, the enemy alien has been the Asian diasporic subject. We don’t have to go as far as the Chinese Exclusion Act to know this. We can go back to just a few years ago when the initial outbreak of COVID-19 resurrected some of the worst anti-Asian actions we have witnessed this century.

Dreaming, for Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen poet Deborah Miranda is one of four Indigenous elements that can lead us to a decolonized future. The three others are story, dance, and song. When combined, Miranda argues, these elements “hasten the decay of Colonizatium.” And so, she proclaims, “Start with Story. / Work your way / home,” a reminder that even amidst dispossession, we can lean on story. I leave story singular because a single story can save a life. A single story can draft a future. A single story might avenge us. A single story might be what brings us back to ourselves. So chase the story. Insist on the dream. Search for a song. Sing it. Practice it. Render it to others. And in that process, dance. Dance in whatever way you are able.