"Insistently returning to the ways bourgeois homemaking is alien to traditional placemaking and community formation, the text observes that administrative efforts to impose a conjugally centered spatiality have not succeeded in supplanting less isolating geographies of kinship. While “at length there came the time when individual allotments of land were made,” in which Dakotas were separated into “father-mother-child units . . . often miles from their other relatives,” even by the mid-twentieth century, more than forty years after allotment began on Teton reservations, “many Indians cannot yet feel complete with just their little family, their spouse and children” (92, 146). The process of detonating broader networks of kinship, shattering them into matrimonial-reproductive “units,” has not altered or eradicated residual Dakota affective attachments structured around the model of the tiospaye. Deloria’s use of the phrase “father-mother-child,” conjoined as the terms are by hyphens rather than commas, suggests that the nuclear family functions as a distinct, freestanding entity within administrative and popular U.S. ideologies while also implying the ways it is ordered around a terrifyingly claustrophobic insularity."
Rifkin, Mark. When did Indians become straight?: Kinship, the history of sexuality, and native sovereignty. Oxford University Press, 2011.
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