The existence of the US as a settler-state involves not simply the removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands but ongoing efforts to remake Indigenous home, family, and placemaking. Native authors engage and critique such colonial violence by attending to how settler domination works to reorganize patterns of everyday Indigenous life in deeply (hetero)gendered ways, and reciprocally, such writing explores networks of relation to persons, places, and non-human entities that provide the lived basis of indigeneity – networks that do not count as “political” in Euro-American terms. Through readings of poetry by Heid Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band Ojibway), Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), and Cheryl Savageau (Abenaki), this essay explores how these writers illustrate historical and ongoing settler efforts to transform and erase ordinary forms of Indigenous feeling and relation. In turn, their writings address the ways such everyday affects are crucial to Indigenous self-determination: to the operation, well-being, and continuance of Indigenous political orders.

This chapter is about the fitful fantasy of sexually and socially horizontal relations. With attention to Whitman’s style and compositional methods, it tracks the intimate gestures or “haptic feelings” that move between the mimetic and the ontic: the hold, the fold, and the press. Doing so illuminates Whitman’s view of the sensorium as the switch-point where representation runs off the printed page to become a thing in the world. In tipping over from the mimetic to the ontic, the haptic discloses the political asymmetries that crosscut the poet’s “object-oriented” fantasies: The hold attaches the catalog to the slave ship; the fold attaches the page to the “adhesive” brain; the press attaches print type to bodily thrusts. This chapter argues that the haptic organizes the turbulent interdependencies of race, sex, and gender that underwrote a poetic project aiming to reconcile sociality’s immediate yet ephemeral intimacy with print’s mediated yet durable intimacy.