time traveling dogs (and other native feminist ways to defy dislocations)

7/25/2019 Time Traveling Dogs (and Other Native Feminist Ways to Defy Dislocations)

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Cultural StudiesCritical Methodologies17

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Article

Introduction

Native people used to live here. White people settled here, they

fled. People of color replaced White people, they suffer.

Coming up the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen will replace

people of color.

La Paperson (2014, p. 121)

If I make a map and not a tracing, it is a map of our selfsame

land. If I make a tracing and not a map, it is made out of chalk

on city cement.

Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and SFHQ (2016, p.17)

If Peggy Ball makes a map, it is a time travel map. It is

acrylic on canvas. Her painting, Vanport, is named after

Vanport City, a temporary city that was destroyed in a flood

in 1948. Built on a flood plain, Vanport was a wartime hous-

ing project meant to accommodate a large population of

workers needed to make ships in Henry Kaisers 24-hr ship-

yards in the Portland and Vancouver area. Before Vanport,

Portland and indeed the state of Oregon, had a very small

non-White populationa reality that was deliberately cre-

ated through a statewide anti-Black covenant.1Before World

War II (WWII), the total Black population in the state was

fewer than 1,800. Vanport increased the Black population in

Oregon by tenfold, from fewer than 2,000 before the war to

nearly 20,000 after the war (Maben, 1987). In May 1948, the

city, with schools, libraries, groceries, administrative build-

ings, and three fire stations, was flooded when heavy rains

caused the dike to break. Vanport is always talked about in

this way, in terms of a naturalized Black/White binary that

erases Native presence because it is never acknowledged.

According to Grand Ronde anthropologist David Lewis (per-

sonal communication, October 25, 2015), the land known as

Vanport is Chinookan land, the Clackamas and Multnomah

peoples lived there on the Columbia River. Much later like

many other urban centers on the North American west coast,it was home to many relocated Native people.

Vanportis a painting of a place that no longer exists but

is remembered and revisited. It is a painting of three sisters

and their dogs standing in front of an apartment building.

One of the girls is a ghost and the dogs are time travelers.

The artist, Peggy Ball, lived in Vanport, and the painting of

the same name not only recalls her memories but also

changes those memories, and so I borrow the term remem-

ory, a concept Toni Morrison creates inBeloved, the classic

novel about slavery, haunting, and ghosts. In the book,

Sethe describes remembering a place that is gone, but in

remembering the place, it continues to exist and existswhether remembered or not. In Oregon, the city of Vanport

is gone, but it exists in rememory. In this article, I will

describe the ways Native presence is erased and replaced,

but actively restored through rememories.

564 CSCXXX10.1177/1532708616640564Cultural Studies Critical MethodologiesMorrill

1University of Oregon, Eugene, USA

Corresponding Author:

Angie Morrill, University of Oregon, 272 Oregon Hall, 1217 Eugene,

OR 97403, USA.

Email: [email protected]

Time Traveling Dogs (and Other NativeFeminist Ways to Defy Dislocations)

Angie Morrill1

Abstract

In this article, I analyze a painting by Modoc/Klamath artist Peggy Ball through a Native feminist reading methodology. Thepainting, Vanport, is named after a city that disappeared in a flood in 1948. The artist survived that flood, and displacement

as did thousands of others. The painting is a rememory map of dislocations and hauntings and disappearances. The painting

remaps gentrified dislocations, telling stories that focus on the relationship of the present to the past and the past to the

future. The painting itself is a Native feminist practice. The travel to places gone, to places that will reappear again; bypeople gone as well as by people presently alive; into times that existed, that never existed, that will exist again; to times

made contemporaneous by time traveling dogs; with people co-present through desireat the heart of all this time travel

is recognition and survivance.

Keywords

Native futures, hauntings, remapping, time travel, dislocations, Vanport flood, ghetto colonialism

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2 Cultural StudiesCritical Methodologies

The painting is a rememory map of dislocations and

hauntings and disappearances. The painting remaps gentri-

fied dislocations, telling stories that focus on the relation-

ship of the present to the past and the past to the future. The

painting itself is a Native feminist practice. The travel to

places gone, to places that will reappear again; by people

gone as well as by people presently alive; into times that

existed, that never existed, that will exist again; to times

made contemporaneous by time travelling dogs; with peo-

ple co-present through desireat the heart of all this time

travel is recognition and survivance.

Theoretical Framework: A Native

Feminist Reading Practice

A Native feminist reading practice is reading survivance

from a place of survivance. Anishinaabe writer and scholar

Gerald Vizenor coined survivance to describe Indigenous

creative approaches to life beyond genocide, beyond the

bareness of survival. Survivance is an intergenerationalconnection to an individual and collective sense of presence

and resistance in personal experience . . . and particularly

through stories (Vizenor, 2013, p. 107). Vizenors defini-

tion is deliberately open, and as a result, survivance is a

term used widely in many areas of Native studies, with

meaning that changes within different contexts. Survivance

existed before the term, and so did a Native feminist reading

methodology.For this article, I define Native feminisms as

the academic and activist practices and theories of Native

women and others working actively against settler colonial-

ism and heteropatriarchy and toward decolonization, rec-

ognition and revitalization of Native women andcommunities. It is a methodology that attends to the transh-

istorical feminist labor of bearing an Indigenous future into

existence out of a genocidal present. It is a methodology

that involves reading against disappearance; it involves

reading futures yet in store for Native lives. I draw upon the

work of many Native feminist scholars including, Lee

Maracle (1988), Ines Hernndez-Avila (2005), Jennifer

Denetdale (2007), Eve Tuck (2009), Michelle Raheja

(2010), Chris Finley (2011), Dian Million (2013), Michelle

Jacob (2013), Mishuana Goeman (2013), Leanne Simpson

(2013), Audra Simpson (2014), Maile Arvin (2015), and so

many others,2because I understand their writing as prac-

tices of reading survivance. I also draw on my ancestors,their lives, their stories, and their refusals. I draw upon my

mothers star quilts and paintings and family photo albums

full of pictures of reservation daysproof of survivance

post Indian wars and pre-termination policy. I know these

quilts, paintings, and photographs to be also already reading

and writing survivance; they are Native feminist reading

and writing practices, from which I hope to learn in devel-

oping my own academic practice. I am trying to articulate a

methodology that allows me to engage the desires, the

knowledges, and the futurities in cultural productions by

Native women even when these same women are overdeter-

mined within settler produced representations.

That these readings are practiced by Indigenous femi-

nists is not meant to make reading a kind of essential mag-

ical ability of Indian women, but rather I take the standpoint

that the reading practice is something done to bear futures

into existence, just as similar practices were done by our

predecessors. It is this shared ontological project of bear-

ing the future out of a genocidal present that connects

Native feminists now and Native women then; in this

respect, it is a survivance practice that recognizes itself

within a tradition of survivance. In short, a Native feminist

reading methodology is reading as self-recognition.

I begin with a discussion of Dian Millions (2013) felt

theory because I define a Native feminist reading practice

as something felt, as deep recognition that goes beyond the

literal. The affect and emotion in Native womens narra-

tives, according to Million, simultaneously designate them

as incomprehensible in the White academy. Felt theories are

profoundly communicative to other Native women ascommunity knowledge, knowledge that interactively

informs our positions as Indigenous scholars, particularly

as Indigenous women scholars (p. 57). In this respect,

Native feminist reading is not just about the text being read;

it is about the transhistorical community of readers and

writers. Therefore, recognition of and by this community is

a critical part of the practice.

I find Millions felt theory useful because any writing

by and about Native women raises issues of speaking:

speaking for ones self or ones community, refusing to

speak, or speaking and not being heard. Native women writ-

ers and historians at some moment have to engage a

dilemma of speaking for a non-speaking past. Speaking has

material consequences. Million (2013) contends, Our

voices rock the boat and perhaps the world. Our voices are

dangerous (p. 57). The danger lies in unsettling settler

innocence, in creating conditions that allow for recognizing

one another and presenting alternative histories to read

the past differently. That is, our voices are dangerous to the

settler nation, and thus are dangerous to ourselves as we

face the likely violence of being silenced again.

Felt theory, Million (2013) explains specifically around

the Truth and Reconciliation Act in Canada, is based on the

impact women speaking and writing about their residential

school experiences had on their First Nations communitiesand then the impact those voices had on Canada internation-

ally and on the idea of justice outside the idea of the nation-

state. Million argues that these statements by Native women

resisted generations of gendered colonization and reasserted

traditional respect of womens power. Million explains

Native womens testimony was spoken but it was also writ-

ten in books published in the 1970s and 1980s. Truths about

colonization, domestic violence, sexual violence, and more

were met with resistance, blame, and assumptions of pathol-

ogy. Their writings, Million explains,

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participated in creating new language for communities to

address the real multilayered facets of their histories and

concerns by insisting on the inclusion of our lived experience,

rich with emotional knowledges, of what pain and grief and

hope meant or mean now in our pasts and futures. (p. 57)

As an act of creating a felt language for articulating past

experiences, for present and future Native women, is pro-ducing a technology of recognition. The problem, Million

(2013) writes, is that this felt scholarship is considered

polemic, or at worst, not as knowledge at all.

These writings and actions by Native women are recog-

nized and read by us, Native women, who recognizea

felt knowledge of what you do that impacts what I do.

Millions felt theory resonates with my work because I

write about my family, I write about womens lives, and I

have been warned by academic mentors, that I was going to

have to be very careful if I wanted to present family pic-

tures, family stories, quilts, and artwork as scholarship.

Much of my scholarship is about locating home, survivingdispossession, claiming space, and listening to ghosts.

These are shared Indigenous projects, rather than strictly

academic ones. One thing I keep in mind with these family

stories is that there is more to it, I cannot tell the all, and I

would not want to make that claim. There is always more to

the story. Pomo writer Greg Sarris (1993) explains about

autobiography, it is not the life but an account or story of

the life (p. 85). No life can be completely told, and there

are reasons why one might choose not to talk about their

life, or aspects of it. Sarris makes a distinction between tell-

ing your story to a social scientist, trained to be an outside

observer, and speaking to family. The social scientist edits

the dialogue into the completed text, but Sarris argues, theoriginal speaker edits their words too. Every story is not for

everybody. Stories have times and places. Sarris remembers

his Pomo elders, Great-Grandma Nettie and Old Auntie

Eleanor, warning the children about speaking to outsiders.

Dont talk much with outside people, Nettie and Eleanor

admonished. Careful what you tell. When the professors

visited each summer, Nettie became silent. Eleanor gave short,

flat answers and told stories no one in the house had ever heard.

(p. 82)

Refusal is a choice and a strategy elaborated by

Kahnawake Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (2007, 2014,see also Tuck & Yang, 2014). As a Native feminist scholar,

refusal is an option that is not a question of if it will be used,

but when and with whom. If I tell my story, you may recog-

nize yourself; you may tell your own story. You may claim

to know me; you may claim my story for yourself, use it as

evidence, or produce it as a truth. Even the stories I do not

tell have power. I wish to state the stories shared here are

not the sum of the all relevant experiences and knowledges

associated with the painting Vanport, they are carefully

curated because, You are not always aware of how you can

be dangerous to me, and this makes me dangerous to you

(Tuck & Ree, 2013, p. 640). I trust that Native feminists

will read between the lines.

Background: Vanport, Quilting,Painting

Peggy Ball grew up in North Portland. She was one of five

children, her mother was Cherokee from Adair, Oklahoma,

and her father was Modoc and Klamath from Chiloquin,

Oregon. Her parents met in the Southwest, married and moved

to the Klamath reservation in Chiloquin. During WWII, the

young couple and their baby daughter Evelyn moved to

Portland, Oregon. They became one of the many families liv-

ing in Vanport, the largest wartime housing development in the

nation and for a time, the second largest city in Oregon, after

Portland. Vanport was created in 1942 to house the thousands

of workers who were working 24 hr a day to create ships forthe war. It was de facto segregated and had a large population

of African Americans, estimated at 40% of the total popula-

tion. Indeed, Vanport is known for being the largest wartime

housing project with a significantly large Black population.

Peggy Ball was born in July 1943 at the time Vanport was fin-

ishing construction. The family lived in Vanport and continued

to grow, Evelyn and Peggys younger brother Woody was born

in 1948. After the war, Vanport remained an active city, with a

police and fire station, a hospital, and a school that would

eventually become Portland State University.

Vanport became of interest to people in 2005 post

Hurricane Katrina, because in May 1948, when Peggy Ballwas almost 5 years old, it was destroyed in a flood that histo-

rians noted had parallels with the flooding of New Orleans.

The flood killed 15 people (although there were rumors that

those numbers were higher) and left many African American

and working people homeless. Peggy Ball remembers living

in Vanport, and her mother waiting almost too long to move

her three children to higher ground. North Portland was the

only neighborhood where the African American refugees of

the flood could rent or own homes, and it is also where the

Ball family lived when Vanport was destroyed.

In 2013, when nerve damage caused by diabetes made it

impossible for Peggy Ball to continue quilting, she began

painting again. She began working on paintings that drewlargely from memories, old family photographs, and her

childhood.

Vanport, Time Traveling Dogs,

Rememory

Vanportis the first painting Peggy Ball did when she stopped

quilting: a painting of three small girls in Vanport, Oregon

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(see Figure 1). In this painting, three sisters are standing at

the edge of the street, some distance in front of the distinctive

Vanport wooden apartments.3The girls are Peggy and her sis-

ters. The oldest sister, Evelyn is standing next to her youngestsister Debbie, who is barefoot. Peggy Ball sits on the side-

walk next to her large yellow dog. The painting plays with

time. Three Ball siblings lived in Vanport, but they were

Evelyn, Peggy, and Woody. Woody, the youngest at the time,

was a baby. Debbie Ball was born in 1951 in Portland and

never lived in Vanport. But this painting is not about repre-

senting an historical truth. The black dog that sits next to

Evelyn is Satch, her beloved companion who died in 1990.

The yellow dog that Peggy rests against is Roy Rogers, King

of the Cowboys, her yellow Labrador who died in 2006. As

an artist and a Native feminist, Peggy Ball gives these chil-

dren their favorite pets and the company of their favorite sis-ter, Debbie, who passed on too soon in 1980. As time

travelers, they can be co-present with one another in a disap-

peared place where it happened (Morrison, 1987, p. 43).

Balls paintings not only recall memories but also change

those memories, and so I use the term rememory, a concept

Toni Morrison (1987) creates inBeloved, the Pulitzer Prize

awarded book about slavery, haunting, and ghosts. The char-

acter of Sethe describes remembering a place that is gone,

but in remembering the place it exists, and it exists whether

it is remembered or not. Vanport is gone, but the children

were there, their family lived there, and it is a haunting

because of the trauma involved in the loss. The home is

there, in the rememory and in the world. Sethe explains,

I was talking about time. Its so hard for me to believe in it.

Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think

it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other

things you never do. But its not. Places, places are still there.If a house burns down, its gone, but the placethe picture of

itstays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the

world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there

outside my head. I mean, even if I dont think it, even if I die,

the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right

in the place where it happened. (p. 43)

It is there where it happened because it haunts the memory

with the violence of the fire for Sethe, or in this case, the vio-

lence of the flood for Peggy. For Sethe, the rememory of place

includes Black friends and families but all under the shadow of

slavery. Both slavery and the relationships vanish together

and that creates the haunting. The Ball family lived there, thechildren went to school, their parents had friends. Not only did

Vanport disappear, but within 7 years, the Klamath tribe is ter-

minated, Peggys father leaves the family, and her mother is

wheelchair bound with multiple sclerosis. Both the violence of

Vanport4and the relationships vanish together. In the flood, a

segregated Black community in a temporary city vanishes, and

an already invisible Native community vanished too. Yet the

home is there, in the time travel and in the world.

An Impossible Presence, a Haunting

From the Future

In the painting, Vanport is standing, and outside of the frame

their mother is whole, their father is with the family, and

their tribe is not yet terminated. These children will soon

lose their home, their tribe, their father, and their mothers

health. Peggy Ball as a Native feminist artist performs

through this painting a restitution, giving the sisters the

things they need: a red wagon to carry their things, and a

sunny day. The most touching of these gifts is Debbie. The

youngest sister with blond hair was not born until 1951, and

she died 29 years later in a car accident. Her impossible pres-

ence recognizes the longing that the sisters have for her, and

how she is always with them. There are visual clues that she

is a specter, different from the other girls. While Peggy issitting and Evelyn standing, both wearing solid saddle shoes,

Debbie is bright in yellow, barefoot, her legs crossed, and

feet barely on the ground. Peggy and Evelyn have white col-

lars on their dresses, and positioned as if for a photo oppor-

tunity. The top of Debbies dress is covered in flowers and

the trim on her dress is black. She is the only one smiling,

standing playfully, and leaning around Evelyn. She is like a

photo-bombing ghost. Peggy looks down with one arm sup-

ported by her dog Roy, who is sleeping, his upper body,

head, and paws resting on the street. The sad, reflective pose

Figure 1. Vanport.Source. Ball (2014).



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Morrill 5

of the girl and her dog suggest the losses that are coming, as

does the young Peggys dress, a mixture of blues and

greensa wetness in contrast to the dry dirt lot behind them.

It is a painting of a ghost and time traveling dogs. But the

painting is not haunted. Ghosts haunt the present with demands

for justice (Gordon, 2008; Tuck & Ree, 2013). As a methodol-

ogy of justice, haunting points toward the future through

engaging the past through the figure of the ghost. Sociologist

Avery Gordon (2008) writes, To study social life one must

confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires

(or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and

make knowledge (p. 7). Hauntings require us to acknowledge

how cities and academies are built upon disappearance, and

thus unsettle settler colonial nations and settler colonial knowl-

edge. The ghost exists here with us, because of violence, and

haunting is the result. The ghost may represent a person, or an

event. The ghost may haunt an individual or society.

The ghost acts because it desires something. That some-

thing may be justice, but it may not. Justice may not be pos-

sible. The desires of the ghost are as complex and complicatedas the desires of the living. Resolution to haunting may be

decolonization or repatriation. Revenge is an option. Violence

causes the haunting. It is possible that more violence may

resolve haunting but there is no promise. Disruption may be

the only resolution. In their Glossary of Haunting, Eve Tuck

and Ree (2013) explain, Haunting aims to wrong the wrongs,

a confrontation that settler horror hopes to evade (p. 642).

The ghost makes evasion impossible. They continue, Social

life, settler colonialism, and haunting are inextricably bound;

each ensures there are always more ghosts to return (p. 642).

Haunting as a methodology recognizes violence and engages

the future through the something to be done that answers

the desire of the ghost.

The painting traces the haunting by revealing the ghost,

and although it may not resolve the haunting by answering

the ghosts desire, it offers something to the ghost and ges-

tures toward the future. It offers a time travel map to visit

with relations past, present, and future.

Unlike Western maps whose intent is often to represent the

real, Native narrative maps often conflict, perhaps add to the

story, or only tell certain parts. Stories and knowledge of certain

places can belong to particular families, clans, or individuals.

These maps are not absolute but instead bring present multiple

perspectivesas do all maps. While narratives and maps help

construct and define worldview, they are not determined and

always open for negotiation. (Goeman, 2013, p. 25)

I read Peggy Balls paintings as time traveling maps.

Creating them is a Native feminist reading/writing practice,

whereby Ball reads the desires in memories and in photos.

She recognizes and honors the desires of the ghost: for a toy

wagon, the warmth of a favorite dog, a sisters company in

a childhood neighborhood. Sisters and two dogs in a place

that does not exist. A sister who was not born yet and died

too soon, a ghost who graces the painting with a smile in a

yellow dress decorated with flowers. The maps are for time

travelers: dogs, ghosts, sisters, and oneself.

Indigenous in Black Space on Native

Land

This painting puts this Native family in Vanport, where the

presence of Native people existed before the flood. For the

past 45 years after the flood, there has been a Delta Park

Powwow and Encampment every third weekend in June

where Vanport used to be. The encampment is a group of

tipis that are erected, and the participants live on the camp-

grounds during the powwow. They return to what is disap-

peared, destroyed. With the presence of a number of tipis,

there is a reclaiming and a declaration that they never really

left.

The Native presence is (t)here, but it often goes unrecog-

nized. North Portland and Vanport were both known for

their significant African American populations. This history

matters because the presence of African Americans in

Oregon has been violent and contested. Between 1844 and

1857, several exclusion laws were passed banning African

American settlement, and not repealed until 1927. Although

ostensibly a free state, the State of Oregon was founded

as in 1859 as an anti-Black state where by law, slaves had to

be set free, then subsequently whiplashed and expelled

(McLagan, n.d.). Today, Oregon is imagined as a White

space. All of settler colonial United States is presumed as

white in whitestream logic, unless it is marked as ghetto

and thereby Black yet still non-Native.

The sisters in the painting, Vanport, are Natives in what isoften imagined as a Black space (and therefore a non-Native

space). Their outlines are also traces of the interwoven histo-

ries and social experiences of Native and Black people in

Vanport, in Oregon, and in the United States. During the

time of the Black exclusion laws in Oregon, the vanquished

Modoc were forcibly removed to Oklahoma, away from

their homelands into what was marked on maps as Indian

Territory. Natives can be dislocated from homelands to res-

ervations, and from reservations to ghettos. The destroyed

Vanport led to the increased Black population of the Albina

neighborhood, and that is where the Ball family moved as

well. There, they were displaced again by the building of

Interstate 5, and finally, the family moved to Fairport Place,a block west of Albina and south of Lombard Avenue.5

North Portland recently gained attention for the increase

in gentrification of White people displacing other White

people. However, the pattern of removing and dislocating

poorer darker people in favor of richer, Whiter people is

long established in Portland and elsewhere (Wile, 2015).

This pattern of displacement follows settler colonial logic

La Paperson (2014) describes within the definition of ghetto

colonialism.



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Settler nations are those where colonial invaders never leave but

instead claim to have become the new Native, and to possess

absolute sovereignty over all life and land within a territory . . .

whiteness emerges as a racial category of entitlements: the right

to claim land and sometimes people as property, and conversely,

the right not to be bound by borders nor bonded as property.

Indian-ness is invented as a form of racial disappearance . . .

blackness is invented as enslavability, illegality, murderability. . . Ghetto colonialism takes place at this intersection between

Indigenous displacement and black dislocation. (p. 116)

Settlers can claim land, whether Plymouth Rock or North

Portland. A neighborhood is undergoing gentrification when

more affluent and highly educated homeowners replace the

poorer people already residing there. The settler colonial rela-

tionship to land is openly acknowledged, people gentrifying

North and Northeast Portland have been referred to in media

as urban homesteaders and pioneers; and they refer to

themselves that way too (e.g., McCausland, n.d.). They never

refer to themselves as gentrifiers because gentrification

always references White people displacing people of color,

even when it is White people displacing other Whites. The

gentrifiers are read as whiter and the gentrified see them-

selves as somehow darker even when they are not. Gentrifier

always has a racial undertone, and so no one wants to be

called that. By contrast, the terms urban homesteadersand

pioneers are only possible as self-monikers because Native

people are already assumed to be disappeared, and so no one

is around to take offenseand self-styled homesteaders can

claim a kind of innocence in an urban frontier.

For settlers seeking new frontiers, the ghetto serves as the

interior frontier to be laid waste in order to renew (Paperson,

2014, p. 116). The stories in the media, when they acknowl-edge Native people at all, follow this explanation:

Native people used to live here. White people settled here, they

fled. People of color replaced white people, they suffer.

Coming up the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen will replace

people of color. (p. 121)

The cosmopolitan citizen is colorful, but not colored. The tele-

vision showPortlandiamocks the colorful settler citizen, com-

plete with beards, bikes, and urban farming but does not

acknowledge the overwhelming Whiteness of that citizen. It

does not need to be acknowledged, the settler citizen is White,

with a fondness for goats, beards, and food allergies. The settlercitizen takes up room on the sidewalk waiting an hour for a

table on a weekend morning, or walking a bike down the side-

walk, but there are other stories that are replaced. Longtime

residents, Native and non-Native, making efforts toward revi-

talization get priced out of their greener neighborhoods as urban

farms make the streets and parks more attractive (Brooks, n.d.).

In her other paintings, Peggy Ball remaps North Portland

to replace absence with presence and bring the past into the

futureand indeed, the future into the pastin ways that

acknowledge the Native presence that is always. They are

there in memories, in pictures, in the yearly encampment

and powwow, and people, Indigenous people who will

always be present on all our land, forever. Balls paintings

practice a recognition, and through that recognition, a heal-

ing. The presence of Debbie is a visitation. It claims the

ghost as family, the presence of our ancestors, and those we

love, who are present through difficult times.

Her paintings from these photos are a Native feminist

reading/writing practice. Peggy Ball reads the desires in the

photos, and writes time traveling maps into her paintings.

The photos are already maps. The paintings are remappings

of those maps. The maps are for time travelers.

Balls paintings are not copies of photographs, but there is

a snapshot quality to them in themes and framing. Two people

face a camera, a candid picture of dancers at a powwow, chil-

dren standing in front of their home with their dogs are all

pictures Peggy Ball brings from her memory. They are memo-

ries that haunt the artist, and the paintings are responses to

haunting that bring the ghosts into view. The ghosts are not

terrifying. They are friends and family who are loved andmissed, missed but never gone because they are often remem-

bered and spoken of with respect and affection. Peggy Balls

paintings fight dislocations by painting connections between

place and people, people and culture. However, this painting

is not a portrait of real life. As a remembering, it is a time

travel and also a remapping. As a painter and Native feminist,

Peggy Ball sees the past differently where presences are

always co-present, but there is a Native feminist reading of

this portrayal of a complex community, with many stories.

Conclusion

I began with a paintinga time travel of people/place/timeand their presence. This is a Native feminist reading, cer-

tainly, of desire and survivance. The paintings themselves

are a Native feminist practice. These practices are rememo-

ries. They are remappings. They provide maps of time trav-

eling and maps for time travelers. All of this travel to places

gone, to places that will reappear again; by people gone as

well as by people presently alive; into times that existed,

that never existed, that will exist again; to times made con-

temporaneous by time travel; with people co-present

through desireat the heart of all this time travel is recog-

nition. Native feminist practices of recognition defy dislo-

cation, and breed desire. This is what we do.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to my mentor K. Wayne Yang for the title and much

more; and to my late mother Peggy Ball for her paintings and

pointing the way toward a Native feminist reading methodology.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with

respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this

article.



7/7

Morrill 7

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research,

authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. Oregons constitution had three Black exclusion laws, since

overturned, that helped discourage Black settlers from com-ing to Oregon. However, Vanport housed a total of 40,000

people during the war, and the percentage of Black occu-

pancy was around 18%. After the war, the White population

decreased and the percentage of Black families grew to 35%

or nearly 15,000 people.

2. These are the books that are on my desk right now. When you

make a list like this one, there are so many names that come

to mind that ought to be included as well. I think it is impor-

tant for us to keep this bibliography full yet unfinished.

3. For people familiar with Vanport or with wartime housing,

almost all articles about Vanport mention the distinctive look

of wooden public housing apartments. Built as temporary

structures, they almost floated away during the flood, bob-

bing up on the waters.

4. The violence of Vanport, of family, and of termination is not

discussed in this article. I expect that Native feminists will

read between the lines.

5. This relocation was one of several targeted at mostly Black

communities in North and Northeast Portland as proximity to

downtown Portland increased interest in the area. Residential

homes were declared substandard housing to make way

for the Lloyd Center Mall, Memorial Coliseum, and the

I-5 Corridor. Urban Renewal projects gained the nickname

Negro Removal in 1960s. (Moreland, 1993, p. 104, 109).

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Author Biography

Angie Morrill holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of

California, San Diego. She is the Coordinator of Native Recruitment at

University of Oregon and an enrolled member of The Klamath Tribes.

UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE J 29 2016bD l d d f
http://commonplacemagazine.org/new-pioneers/crossing-the-green-divide/http://commonplacemagazine.org/new-pioneers/crossing-the-green-divide/http://www.sunset.com/travel/northwest/urban-homesteading-portland-oregonhttp://www.sunset.com/travel/northwest/urban-homesteading-portland-oregonhttp://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-laws-oregon-1844-1857http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-laws-oregon-1844-1857http://fusion.net/story/44321/portland-is-the-most-gentrified-city-of-the-century/http://fusion.net/story/44321/portland-is-the-most-gentrified-city-of-the-century/http://fusion.net/story/44321/portland-is-the-most-gentrified-city-of-the-century/http://csc.sagepub.com/http://csc.sagepub.com/http://csc.sagepub.com/http://csc.sagepub.com/http://fusion.net/story/44321/portland-is-the-most-gentrified-city-of-the-century/http://fusion.net/story/44321/portland-is-the-most-gentrified-city-of-the-century/http://fusion.net/story/44321/portland-is-the-most-gentrified-city-of-the-century/http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-laws-oregon-1844-1857http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-laws-oregon-1844-1857http://www.sunset.com/travel/northwest/urban-homesteading-portland-oregonhttp://www.sunset.com/travel/northwest/urban-homesteading-portland-oregonhttp://commonplacemagazine.org/new-pioneers/crossing-the-green-divide/http://commonplacemagazine.org/new-pioneers/crossing-the-green-divide/

time traveling dogs (and other native feminist ways to defy dislocations)

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