Past as Prologue

Abstract

What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her. No, you dare not make war on cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King.

The Letter: Fidelity in Researcher Positionality to Exhume Dispossessed Voices for Leavy’s Concept of Coherence in Feminist Narrative Research

“…The fidelity of researcher positionality in the exploration of posthumous narrative archives carries a two-fold responsibility for authentic consideration and respect, without which the work may be suspect and incomplete. Further research should consider the Haskell Institute records within the National Archives (Moravec, 2017) to better characterize Mary's educational experiences amid an era of intentional cultural annihilation, as well as an analysis of the collective narrative of Hauberg's interpretations, paraphrases, and summaries of Mary's existence through the lens of resilience as an emergent theme and existent among land cultures that experience land dispossession (Throne, 2016;Woodiwiss et al, 2017). In addition, a qualitative phenomenological study is recommended for further exploration of Mary's lived experience using the full archival Hauberg collection to consider the constructs of voice or resilience as the understanding of the lived experiences of Black Hawk's female descendants remain limited.…”

“…As Fitzgerald (2015) noted, these disparate voices can eventually form a coherent whole by which to better understand the lived experience from a gendered perspective, and that the disparate can emerge as a coherent multiplicity of voices. My own researcher positionality was informed by an ancestry of European and Scandinavian immigrants who settled the Midwest on land parcels forcibly vacated by these native peoples while my viewpoint issituated within an aesthetic and epistemology rooted in feminist principles and a researchbased understanding of the complexities of land culture as curators for the spiritual and relational aspects of earth and coastal access (Throne, 2016;Throne, 2018a) along with a necessity for process internalization, challenges to assumptions, and reflexivity in ongoing research-based inquiry. Likewise, Fletcher(2014) posited a privileged ontological position exists for white; yet, also noted white is panoptic with an inherent power for invisibility and observation.…”

“…As Griffiths (2017) and others have noted, the white male voice from the dominant or repressive culture often comes from one with degrees or layers of privilege, which often nuance the narrative. This creates a dilemma for the archival narrative researcher who desires to explore lived experience by the departed who can no longer speak for themselves beyond the archival textual record (Throne, 2016); however, as Byrnes (2017) noted, these retrospective stories can be analyzed and represented in a nonhierarchical and non-dominant manner by leveling the respective voices of researcher, subject, and the literature, or in this case, the additional voice of Hauberg as interpreter/recorder of Mary's experiences.…”