by Sedonna Goeman-Shulsky
Warning: this references violence against a woman, my aunt, in parallel with how Venus was murdered, as Hartman describes. This work grapples with violence and the intergenerational impacts that my Native aunt’s murder has had on my family, including me and my generation. The impact of these events has lasted decades in this part of my family, but I want to make clear two things: there is much joy and happiness in my family’s collective memories, and my positionality coming from both dispossessed Tonawanda Seneca people and white settlers who participated in dispossession. This is only a snapshot of our lives and those interactions.
I grew up learning how to weave together half-stories into a tapestry of my family’s history, adding bit by bit to my own memorized archive. I spent my time as a child peeling potatoes and carrots at family functions while eavesdropping on the memories they would reference offhand and observing body language in anticipation of more to learn. There was unspoken subtext in every conversation, argument, and joke, and as I grew up, I became skilled in extracting pieces of our family’s history. On behalf of my own curiosity and my younger cousin’s encouragement in hushed tones when we were sent to bed, a major priority was to find out everything I possibly could about our grandfather, Mishuan Goeman. In pursuit of this mysterious figure in our lives, who died just before I was born but left behind a long-lingering presence we children felt deeply, I started to file away the little details and hints to paint a picture of who my grandfather was and learned about other family members we never got to meet but who left impacts even us children, a decade later, could sense. Through this effort, I built up informal and ever-useful interviewing skills, learning to subtly ask questions that might elicit a real memory, something truer than those tinted with resentment or anger, or grief. Eventually, I became somewhat of a confidant, a vessel for the safekeeping of family history—an archivist of our family’s past. It's no wonder I became an archivist professionally as an adult, even if it was for a short while. Recently, I even took on the effort of trying to track down the missing family members… those who were taken as children, those who were “adopted” with no records kept, who appeared suddenly with no birth paperwork or trace to their own parents, those who were murdered or went missing. Those who may or may not exist.
The silence I’ve been facing as I search for those missing family members and stories is resonant with Hartman’s version of archives as places full of silence (structured spaces which reduce enslaved women to their most painful moments, vanishing any trace of their personalities or variety of their daily realities). Her remedy of critical fabulation is a monumentally important tool for people who are either excluded from or misrepresented in most archives, especially those descendants of people whose true stories were disfigured and disregarded. Hartman describes ancestors of a different connection, a few generations back, who nonetheless represent a thread throughout the long history of violence Black women have faced in the so-called United States. That violence fueled more violence--massacres, boarding schools, land theft by force (and therefore cultural genocide). Black and Native women have been abused for hundreds of years by the same force in different ways: settler colonization. So while Hartman’s critical fabulation was created to address Black women’s stories, it is a tool that is useful and relevant to Native stories as well. We don’t share the same stories, silences, suffering, or identities—but they leave us, the descendants, with a similar longing for more.
I started lamenting the obfuscating work of formal archives when I stumbled upon an FBI database of declassified surveillance records from the American Indian Movement (AIM) era. I was in class, ignoring a very patient librarian who was showing us how to navigate the UCLA library webpage, when I saw the FBI AIM files available to UCLA students. It is a searchable digital archive, and I thought back to my grandmother’s half-told stories about going along with my grandfather and his siblings to join up with AIM. I wondered if their names would show up and if this might be another way to gather clues about who my grandfather was as a person. So I typed “Goeman” into the database.
What I found was, in part, hilarious but mostly infuriatingly unhelpful.
My Uncle’s name came up many times, but only in heavily redacted reports about one instance my Uncle didn’t even deem remarkable enough to mention when he did talk about AIM. I know for a fact there are more dramatic and “interesting” stories about my family’s time fighting for AIM, but all I can find is yet another partial story about something my own family found so routine that they can’t remember the redacted details? What else is the U.S. government withholding?
It's exhausting and potentially unethical work to extract stories about my family from those who are still around. As a child I felt entitled to know, and I wanted my family to feel like I should know—but I’ve grown to learn that some silences exist for a reason. I have been taught that my family has to protect themselves, and me, from certain memories that they deem too harmful to recall or preserve.
My grandfather is certainly not a Venus. But my Aunt Daynonah, my mother’s favorite Aunt who kept baby foxes and hitchhiked with my mother to take a dead rabbit to the Vet? When my mother and I visited my Uncle and asked about Daynonah, innocently and sweetly, he told the truth to my mom for the first time that day because I probed; my mother cried in a way I’ll never forget. Sweet stories about baby animals and kind gestures, big laughs, and bold outfits, now tinged with particular grief and anger for how she was taken from our family, violently murdered, and body left alone on a road. I’m left to grapple with whether I’m better or worse for knowing some of the things I’ve tucked away into our family archive but will never be able to find tangible records about--my Aunt Daynonah never had an obituary, no investigation was conducted, no records are available online beyond her birth and death dates, and the only real information I know about her is through my mother and Uncle.
Hartman concludes Venus in Two Acts with “we too emerge from the encounter with a sense of incompleteness and with the recognition that some part of the self is missing as a consequence of this engagement.” But I can’t help to feel that some stories do not, could not, and perhaps should not live in an archive to be stewarded by people that would never digitize their materials or appreciate the importance of what they have. Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) efforts following recognition of a genocide always seek to build an archive of what happened, documenting the violence one population committed against the other but only examining the impact on the victims, never the oppressors and any guilt, malice, and evil they might have dealt with while carrying out heinous acts. These commissions operate under the assumption that everyone must know how people suffered so that it will not be replicated. But here, the archive becomes the endpoint--as if creating a TRC and collecting these stories releases the country and not-so-former oppressors from their actions. It places genocide in the past when it’s an ongoing project--missing and murdered Native women and their relatives across Turtle Island would like a word, starting with just those abducted and found today.
Why does the FBI or the Smithsonian, branches of the same entity that started the chains of events that led to me missing family members, deserve unlimited access and control over my ancestors or family’s pictures and stories, but not me? Why does my family owe everyone in the United States the details about the people they stole from us, when we can barely keep that alive between ourselves? These days, I’d rather have my half-stories passed down in an oral tradition, replete with its gaps, and fill in the blanks myself, because I don’t believe many other people deserve to know the truth (not that it could be contained in an archive, anyways). I wonder if Hartman wants everyone to know Venus, or if she really wants for people who can understand Venus to have access to her history. Who has no choice but to read between the files of an archive? When is silence protection against those who wouldn’t understand or could not relate, those who would only harm further by misinterpreting our joys and sorrows?
An elder I interviewed about repatriation work explained that as someone who holds their community’s history, who knows what hasn’t necessarily been written down about what happened to California Native people at the missions, expressed his concern for people who learn about all the awful things that have happened to their ancestors but have no support. “It’s like, if they know, what’s that going to do to them—to their health?”
The first few months of my job as an archaeology assistant at a museum, I felt ill and uneasy all the time. I didn’t sleep well for months—dreams too vivid and sharp. The first time I set foot in the ancestor’s room to assist with a repatriation case, I found a box that explained why: a box labeled Canandaigua. Two of my ancestors’ bodies, unknown people who may or may not be directly related to me, but who at the very least lived with my family, shared meals and jokes and experiences. Taken from their graves, disturbed in pursuit of some colonizer’s petty dissertation research. They’d been there the whole time, and I wasn’t given the opportunity to treat them with the specific respect and reverence they deserved--I didn’t automatically have access to the room or archive, even as an employee, and those who did have that power did not think to share it with me.
While I believe in record keeping, history, archives (both collections of records and bodily remembrances), I’ve come to appreciate what I can’t know. There are things out there that I’m meant to know, that I will be asked to understand by someone in my community. Stories that I’ll be prepared to handle. But I will no longer turn to FBI or Smithsonian databases for any kind of “truth.” As Harris outlines, the oppressor’s silence and audacity balances but yields too much and too little of the stories I want to know. I know too much about the length and physiology of my Native ancestors’ leg bones desecrated by white archaeologists, too much about my white ancestor’s silly experience being brought to court for wearing silk in 1657, too much about how my aunt and uncles died by racist and gendered attacks… and too little of that which I think might make me feel whole—too little about the personalities and lives of my missing family members who should have been here to talk to me themselves, too little about what they might have cooked at family gatherings or contributed to family stories while I helped prepare vegetables. And perhaps I’m selfish not to feel bad that a stranger will be just as in the dark about that as I am—but I am somewhat at peace with the half-stories I’ve worked hard to stitch together to form an idea of what those relatives were like. While they’re instructive and valuable stories, they are now my responsibility to keep and hold dear. Do I want to share them with just anybody? Am I obligated to make an example of my family’s history to benefit people who can’t understand it viscerally, emotionally, or intensely? No, my family didn’t, doesn’t exist to be an example that instigates settler guilt-based learning. So I’ll keep my own archive, prying settler eyes be damned.
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