Native Subjects

This essay develops "reading as a relative" as a critical methodology for Indigenous literary studies, arguing that Indigenous literary texts don't merely represent relational ontologies but actively enact them, positioning readers within networks of kinship and responsibility through specific formal strategies. Drawing on Kenneth Morrison's post-Cartesian anthropology and his concept of dividuation, or personhood that emerges through relationship rather than prior to it, I propose "temporal technologies": practices that generate recursive relationships between past, present, and future, maintaining kinships that colonial structures have tried to sever. I situate this methodology against Fredric Jameson's dialectical speculation, which for all its utopian ambition retains the detached observer position encoded in the Latin specula and speculum, and New Materialist frameworks that account for nonhuman agency but stop short of personhood understood as ethical addressability within obligation-bearing, territorially specific kinship relations. Close readings of Layli Long Soldier's Whereas and Sherwin Bitsui's Flood Song demonstrate these temporal technologies in practice, proposing Indigenous future-making not as utopian projection but as the reactivation of relationships that have never ceased generating futures.