Amy Hamilton cares about Indigenous grasses and the problem of invasive species – which turns out to be a perfect metaphor for our deep talks about growing up White in the West. How whiteness relates to feminism and issues of communal accountability is on Amy’s mind, it’s been on her mind for years because she teaches and writes in the field of Native American Studies. [For Amy’s scholarly bio, see here.] Our conversations pivot around early teenage feminist consciousness, the inevitable whiteness of our histories, and especially how to contend with that whiteness, not to disavow it. These are trepidatious conversations, we worry over talking about whiteness, knowing we will get things wrong.
It’s early in the day, cool, and José and I make our way to Eldorado, a community a few miles outside of Santa Fe. We are meeting at Amy’s parents’ home. They have lived there seven years, after forty years living in town where Amy grew up. She is there for several weeks with her sons and her husband Chris. It’s a great spot to meet, quiet for an interview, and meaningful to Amy. The houses get bigger, the spreads more separate. Obviously, we are traveling toward more monied living though Eldorado is more affordable than Santa Fe proper. These details make up some the material facts of the kind of whiteness both Amy and I grew up inside.
Our van turns into a handsomely graveled long private driveway, and we park at its end. Talk about gorgeous! The house seems cut into the hillside, built to nestle. Were she living, my dear aunt Adrian from Pueblo, whose closest friend hung a couple of Taos Ten paintings in the home they shared, would talk approvingly about the architecture and calm of this place. We step down from gravel into a shaded series of connected courtyards, scrub and miniature trees making a piney fragrant entrance. Amy opens the front door, and there are her boys! Bright eyed, welcoming, sitting on big sofas in a cool living room. They are hanging out a minute while their dad and grandad get ready to take them swimming in the community pool. Chris comes out for introductions. I ask the boys whether the local skate park is welcoming. It is. I’m trying to get them to laugh at the expense (gently) of their dad, who also skates. They say there’s a guy “even older than him” who’s teaching kids to hand plant. The guy has skills, but their dad gets along all right.
Very nice vibe going this morning in Amy’s family.
The Where of Here: Eldorado
Krista Comer. For the record, we are at your parents’ house. We’ve gotten to meet your sons! James is 14, Sam is 11. And we met Chris, your husband. Your family has been here for a couple of weeks. Swimming, mountain biking, skating. You’re leaving to return to Michigan tomorrow [to Marquette, northern Michigan].
Amy Hamilton. Tomorrow, yeah.
Krista Comer. And your parents are around. They’ve been here seven years.
Amy Hamilton. At this house, seven years. They moved here from my childhood house, the house I grew up in, where they lived for 40-something years.
Krista Comer. They’ve been in Santa Fe now a long time.
Amy Hamilton. Yes.
Amy Hamilton. One of the things I’ve been mulling around over the last few days, about “the where,” is that my experience of Santa Fe, at this point in my life, is like a palimpsest. It’s layers. Layers of memory – connected to experiences and stories, connected to the place itself, the feeling of being here, the feeling of the air, the kind of light that’s here, unlike light where I live, it’s just very different [than northern Michigan]. There are the layers of what it means to be back here now. I feel that this is my place, but I also am here temporarily, I’m here as a [summer] visitor. The place is continuing on without me. My old dentist office, pediatric dentist . . . is now a gallery. Right? Of course.
Krista Comer. Only in Santa Fe!
Amy Hamilton. In Santa Fe, everything becomes a gallery.
Krista Comer. In Houston, it would be . . . ?? Something else [laughs].
Amy Hamilton. There’s a house downtown that a friend of mine grew up in, I used to go to birthday parties at this house. It’s a bank now. It’s odd, but it’s so familiar. Layers of knowledge.
I was on sabbatical in the 2015 to 2016 academic year. We lived here in my parents’ house for the year. This is where I wrote Peregrinations: Walking in American Literature. That year was so wonderful, full of writing and reconnecting with friends and family that I’ve known my whole life and my children going to school here, not at the school I went to, but going to school here, [making friends they seen in the summers], and experiencing a very different culture from the upper Midwest. That’s a whole other layer of memories and experiences. It’s a funny thing to think about Santa Fe for me, because it’s at once something that I could talk about forever, but also something that’s really difficult to articulate because it’s so deep, it’s so felt. If that makes sense.
Krista Comer. A lot of people are saying a version of this. Talking about relations to places is more challenging than one imagines, unexpectedly so.
Amy Hamilton. My parents have been in Santa Fe a long time. But you know, but they are never going to be native to this place. Or they’re never going to feel like this is their place in the same way that it’s my place. Because they grew up elsewhere. My mother’s from the East Coast, from Maine. My father grew up in Southern California, in Riverside. Their sense of home place is connected to those landscapes, whereas mine is connected here. And even though my sons spend a lot of time in New Mexico – because we’re here every year for some time in the summer, and then every other year we’re here at Christmas. And then that sabbatical year. But their place, their home place, is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Lake Superior. And it’s a very interesting experience to have that separation. Especially growing up in Santa Fe, where there are so many families here, both Indigenous families and Chicanx families who trace their families way, way, way back. It was not an unusual experience in high school to go to a party with one of my friends and she would talk to somebody and say, “Oh, wait, I think . . . are you my cousin?” That was a very common experience. And for me, I think of this as connected to whiteness . . .
Krista Comer. Yes, this is the discussion we were having before we turned on the camera, and that we really want to tease out as much as we can.
Amy Hamilton. Yeah. My parents had the ability to move here from California when I was a baby. I was born in LA, and 1970s LA was… the smog was horrific. My parents didn’t want to raise their family there. There was also the problem of commuting and the long commutes on the freeways in California, which continues to be an issue in Southern California, much worse now. So they moved to this place. My dad is a lawyer, and he worked for the highway department. He now works for a private firm. My mother was able to continue her career in education. They had that mobility.
I grew up with many other children from families like mine. Parents who were hippies or hippie adjacent. My parents were more hippie adjacent. [both laugh]
I grew up with lots of friends whose families moved here to live on some of the communes that were popping up in New Mexico in the 60s and 70s. I have friends who were born on the Hog Farm in Taos and in other places, and that was my primary community as a small child. I was in playgroups with those people, with these primarily white families who moved here to raise their children and had this idea about what it meant to raise their children in New Mexico. In some cases, they had a romanticized vision of what that meant to be growing up here. There’s a lot of New Age stuff in the community that I lived in, not my parents so much, but definitely there’s a lot of that viewpoint, crystals and…
Krista Comer. Crystals were a part of people’s sense of relation to land, or to the universe?
Amy Hamilton. To the spirit of place, the sense of place. We were connected in this New Age way. That was very much my experience in childhood. Not in my own family, but in the community that I was part of.
Krista Comer. What about the American West, and romanticized ideas about Santa Fe for white hippies or white hippy-adjacent families?
Amy Hamilton. There was a dialogue with the US West, absolutely. That prominent idea about space and land and available land, available space that was here, or was imagined to be here. And ways of becoming part of the communities that were already established here often in problematic ways. . . adopting acequia culture, for example, or adopting the stories of this place, as your own in a way that was often very problematic.
Krista Comer. Were the hippie communes trying to manage water in ways that were working with the acequia culture but not respectful or just unconscious?
Amy Hamilton. Yeah, unconscious, perhaps, very naive, not recognizing the communities that they were impinging upon, who often . . .
Krista Comer. Pushed back?
Amy Hamilton. Pushed back and thought that the hippies were kind of funny, kind of teasing them. Who saw their naivete, and a lot of eye rolling…
Krista Comer. Do you have memories of that? Or what is a story you remember hearing about?
Amy Hamilton. It’s anecdotal, more like too little, too late.
Living on the land right next to land grant land, and the people who had lived there for a long time, and expecting to be embraced by them, and brought into that experience of place and learning how to build adobe houses. You know… the hippie “earth ships” around Taos? The earth ships are environmentally friendly, built with what’s available, and sort of connected to Indigenous ways of living in the land, but also connected to Eastern religions, Feng shui and other ways of imagining space.
Krista Comer. Do your friends talk about being “native” in a way that is more complex for white people to say these days? People who are aware of other claims on land and place?
Amy Hamilton. There’s a definite understanding of those complexities. This history has always been there. You think about Black Lives Matter and the attention to monuments that has happened this year, and in Santa Fe, the obelisk downtown recently came down. It was a four-sided obelisk that was in the middle of the plaza. Three of the four sides commemorate New Mexico’s role in the Civil War, for example the Battle of Glorieta Pass, which was just this way [pointing] from where we’re sitting. . . It was the furthest western Battle of the Civil War. And the fourth side of the obelisk had the language of “savage Indians” on it. Years and years ago, I believe in the early 1970s, somebody took a chisel and chiseled out the word “savage.” So there was a blank rectangle. I don’t remember it ever being anything but the blank rectangle, but everyone knew what had been there. It’s about the success of the US Army in turning back the Indigenous people. And so when there was this resurgence of attention to monuments, and more focused attention to monuments . . . [and after a lot of foot-dragging about removing it], a group of activists came together, tied ropes to the top of the obelisk, and pulled it down, and it broke. They destroyed it.
We talk about the history of this place, and what it means for me to claim this place and be a part of that history. I am able to claim this place because of that history. Growing up, we knew this history, but Santa Fe markets itself as a place where three cultures exist harmoniously. That’s never really been the reality. There’s segregation here. Not completely, but there’s a fair amount. And there are absolutely tensions.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about becoming Indigenous to place. And I think about that a lot and about what she’s getting at with that, because there is a way of taking that permission to claim “nativeness.” I used that word earlier, and it’s not the right word, I don’t know what the right word is. But I think Kimmerer’s talking about responsibility. To become Indigenous to place is to recognize your responsibility. That’s how I understand it. Responsibility to a place includes an acknowledgement of and a reckoning with separations, distinctions.
Krista Comer. The term “responsibility” clicks for me to accountability. Can you talk about your sense of feminism?
Amy Hamilton. It’s a really difficult question for me, and I’m not quite sure why it’s as difficult as it is because I’ve always identified as a feminist, although what that means has changed over time. I’m currently serving as a director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northern. My undergraduate degree was English and Women’s Studies. I’m surrounded by these conversations, and I’m immersed in them, I’m part of them. When I go back to the beginning of my feminism, it comes back to growing up in the community I grew up in. We would go to the crystal and New Age Book store, and I think that’s where I bought my first book that was a feminist book, which was Women who Run with the Wolves.
Krista Comer. These early feminisms are such important things to not reject, not renounce. We get trained away from them, trained to critique them. In “Once We Find Each Other, so Much Else Becomes Possible,” Sara Ahmed talks about coming into universities, with the selves we already are. We bring our histories, we don’t arrive un-formed. She’s talking about graduate studies. But we get taught to reject these selves, we don’t laugh about them. We don’t tell stories about them. They’re not dear to us. We just begin to disavow out of shame. Perhaps it’s a white woman’s thing even moreso, I don’t know. But you talk about your relation to the term feminism as difficult, elusive.
Amy Hamilton. Right because we are trained to critique the early selves, like oh, that’s silly.
Krista Comer. Let’s talk for a minute more about you buying that book Women Who Run with the Wolves and what it meant, and the crystals.
Amy Hamilton. I think that was where I felt a sense of empowerment. Like oh, this is something that I can belong to. This is something I can identify with. This is a place where I can find community and power, right? I was probably [my son] James’s age, 14 or 15.
Like, who am I? And how do I understand that identity in a community, the specific community that I live in where, you know, I have peers with connections to Indigenous cultures or . . . many friends of mine who could trace their identity back through the generations to the Conquistadores.
You want me to tell you a story of those days . . . there wasn’t a lot to do in Santa Fe for teenagers. Except get in trouble, which we did plenty of. But my best friend and I used to go for drives into the mountains and get out of the car, not to go on big hikes, but just to walk away from the car, away from the parking lot, and into the woods, into the land, and spend an hour hanging out. We often went during the fall, when the aspen leaves were changing. We’d take the leaves and put them in our hair. There was absolutely a sense of the two of us being women together in the woods. That sense of friendship and connection was a part of my earliest [feminist] identity. Feeling connected. This was our place, where we could be whomever we wanted.
Krista Comer. For you, it was about women, bonds with other women, it wasn’t a way to stave off male domination? Men weren’t all over you?
Amy Hamilton. Bonds with other women, a kind of empowerment. At that point it was more personal, not about men. And a sense of land and place.
Krista Comer. The work in Peregrinations on walking came out of that? Or the work we posted “Colonialism and Gendered Violence in the Grassy, Bloody West” about grasses vs. lawns, forthcoming in Susan Bernardin’s Gender and the American West volume? As I read that piece, it offers a witnessing, a kind of white feminist witnessing, about lawns as settler practices. That’s not how you write about it exactly (as white feminist witnessing}. You have different stakes there.
Amy Hamilton. In college, I started reading Willa Cather, Mary Austin and Georgia O’Keeffe – growing up in Santa Fe, Georgia O’Keeffe is always in the background – she’s always here and her experience of the land, her experience of Abiquiu, that place, that kind of connection became very, even more crystallized for me.
Krista Comer. [Crystalized] As a verb.
Amy Hamilton. Right, you hold the crystals and feel the spirit-
When I was in college, studying Women’s Studies, trying to figure out what that meant, looking back on very cringy things . . .
Krista Comer. But this is what we have to claim . . .
Amy Hamilton. I know.
Krista Comer. Let’s cringe together because you are not alone.
Amy Hamilton. What empowerment meant, how to become empowered, as a young [college] woman I saw that through claiming my sexuality. I did a senior project – talk about cringe- a photography project for a women’s studies class, juxtaposing elements that seemed to me to be unfeminine.
Krista Comer. Unfeminine? Not unfeminist?
Amy Hamilton. No, unfeminine, with a defiance . . . here’s the big cringe, right? This is the one I really remember because it was so cringy.
Krista Comer. Oh, we should put this up as a picture in our blog.
Amy Hamilton. I don’t know where it is, Krista, I don’t know if I can find it.
Krista Comer. Oh, you’re resourceful.
Amy Hamilton. I don’t know if it exists anymore.
Krista Comer. Let’s assume you are motivated.
Amy Hamilton. It was a picture of me. I borrowed one of my girlfriends’ tight red skirts, it was knee length, I put on high heels. The picture was me sitting on the toilet with this dress on, with these spike heels, reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. [Giggles]
Krista Comer. That’s pretty resourceful!
Amy Hamilton. The project was about putting it all together, I am all of these things at once. I can be sexy, also studious, and also sitting on the toilet. [both laugh] That was how I was kind of coming to some sense of … [both laugh] feminism.
Krista Comer. What the hell, it’s great! I think we should restage it now. Reclaim that 18 year old out of respect for that history. In the vein of Sara Ahmed . . . not disavow, tell a loving white story about her.
Amy Hamilton. We see in those histories a kind of obliviousness to privilege, to our own histories, a flattening out of what, what it means to be a person, a woman. Really interesting to remember.
Krista Comer. Well, lots of white women critique privileges without an ability to talk about the “me” of the white feminist. It would be really good for the work on anti-racism, if we could do that somehow, not renounce it so much we can’t even remember it.
Amy Hamilton. The fear for me is the fear of doing harm to someone else. Right? In that kind of feminism, in what it does not acknowledge, it actively does harm. And that’s the last way I want to be in the world. And yet-
Krista Comer. There’s not an escaping of that.
Amy Hamilton. There’s not an escape.
The other major project I did my senior year was a thesis. In it I first started making connections between feminism and place. I wrote about Southwestern writers (Jimmy Santiago Baca, Rudolfo Anaya, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo) and their various representations of the land as feminine. That project also introduced me to Annette Kolodny’s work, which eventually led me to working with her at the University of Arizona and then to the WLA. So, even in the midst of my fumbling, I was finding my way to the work that has defined my life and my career.
I was thinking about the section “Heading Out” on your blog for Living West as Feminists, where you talk about the “I” and using the I. It gets buried, right? What does it mean to bring it in? How uncomfortable it can be to bring the “I” back in! If I bring the “I” in, am I being rigorous in my analysis, right? But maybe using the “I” deepens analysis, complicates things. And of course the “I” is always there, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Krista Comer. Yeah, it is more rigorous to self-consciously use the “I” in feminist traditions of positionality. The “I” is a way to locate strong objectivity, or materialist feminisms, or situated knowledges, standpoint knowledges. Stronger forms of objectivity are objectivities that locate the “I.”
I love your reading of the Layli Long Soldier poem “Whereas” [in the essay for Gender and The American West]. This is not your investment, but in my own reading of your essay, I was thinking of Amy Hamilton showing up as an “I,” as a white feminist, walking through the witnessing that piece does as an “I” who understands about white settler histories herself.
Amy Hamilton. For the summer conference of ASLE (Association for Study of Literature & Environment), I did a recorded session. It’s the beginning of my next book, which is going to be about grass. I’ve been thinking of shifting my approach, pulling more of an “I” voice, which I used in the pedagogy piece that I did for Teaching Western American Literature, the book Brady Harrison and Randi Tanglen edited. I’ve been thinking a lot about how and where to make that personal perspective a more active part of my work.
With grass, one of the things I write about is the Indigenous grass. And then the invasive. Such a metaphor there.
Krista Comer. Knowing that one is an invasive species, how then, to move?
Amy Hamilton. How to move, yes, right.
Temporary Conclusions . . .
This conversation with Amy sticks with me viscerally. My own interview in Pueblo is next, and it is a perfect segue. I am thinking that the ability not to excise the whiteness is a baseline strategy for white feminist accountabilities. Talking in the first person, putting the “I” into our writing and teaching, is a functional step in accountabilities. Not to defend white politics, but to say the obvious, that one is raised white, with whatever that means, before university time and rerouting ourselves. As we learn to talk more forthrightly about whiteness, think better, we become less trouble for our non-white friends. Perhaps we develop better ways to connect with other white people about our white histories and unconscious habits.