"I am the torn seam of two worlds": Ernestine Hayes's Alaska Native Memoirs, Indigenous Storywork, and New Forms of the Global South

ABSTRACT: In Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir (2006) and The Tao of Raven: An Alaska Native Memoir (2017), Ernestine Hayes weaves together ancient stories and modern lived experiences of the Tlingit people, who have inhabited the southeastern portions of Alaska since time immemorial, to bear witness to far-reaching effects of U.S. settler colonialism since the Alaska Purchase in 1867. Set in what is now known as Southeast Alaska, Hayes's memoirs of the Tlingit people reach beyond colonial and national fantasies of Alaska to recuperate a diverse geographical imaginary and ecosphere of the Far North. This essay examines Hayes's Blonde Indian and The Tao of Raven in terms of their Tlingit-inspired, decolonial treatments of storytelling, layered temporality, and ecological thinking. In addition to Hayes's indigenization of Alaska through a decolonial approach to content and craft, which this essay addresses, Blonde Indian and The Tao of Raven also provide an occasion to consider changing formations of the Global South. The essay engages with oceanic and hemispheric studies, which have mapped out external factors, sites, and routes that problematize the Global South's ongoing reliance on the North/South divide to apprehend histories of uneven development, wealth accumulation, and globalization. Settler colonialism—while devastating and ongoing—does not have the final say as history, however, as Hayes rehabilitates Alaska with Tlingit senses of cosmology, culture, and storytelling spanning the pre-colonial and the present.