I. Near the beginning of his 1833 narrative, Sauk warrior Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk, or Black Hawk, interrupts himself. Stepping out of the account he is narrating—the account of his resistance to the white theft of Sauk lands that culminated in the Black Hawk War—he states, "My memory is not very good, since my late visit to the white people. I have still a buzzing in my ears, from the noise—and may give some parts of my story out of place; but I will endeavor to be correct." 1 This moment is one of several in Life of Black Hawk in which Black Hawk self-consciously disrupts his own story in order to comment on the larger circumstances of disruption that he recounts. 2 The passage also records a moment of apparent impairment, or of fluctuation in Black Hawk's storytelling capacity: the weakened memory, the "buzzing" in the ears, and the storytelling "out of place" seem to index the crowding and stress Black Hawk experienced as a prisoner of war held by the US government.

In this essay, I read this moment in Black Hawk's narrative as one that illuminates the intertwined experiences of fluctuating narrative voice and settler colonialism, and one that reveals the entanglements of disability and settler colonial archives and archival methods. To do so, I first close-read this interruption to suggest that it registers a relationship between settler colonialism and impairment in Black Hawk's life. Building off of critical work that situates Life of Black Hawk as a layered, collaborative text preserving and averring many voices and stories, I suggest that the text demonstrates an intersection of archival concerns and practices specific to settler colonialism and disability studies. I theorize this relationship through the appearance of Life in twentieth-century records of the Indian Claims Commission. Finally, I conclude with a reading of the Sac and Fox Nation's current reception of Life as a sustained interruption of settler colonialism that foregrounds ongoing tribal networks of support.

II. Black Hawk interrupts his narrative with this pause at one of the many moments in Life in which community restoration through care seeks to repair violence and loss. When he dictated Life of Black Hawk around 1832, he had just returned to the banks of the Des Moines River from traveling as a prisoner of war through US urban centers on the east coast. Black Hawk's interruption refers to this "late time with the whites" as he pauses to take in its effects. This interruption of his narrative comes just as Black Hawk had been caring for an injured warrior's family "by hunting and fishing" and "provid[ing] for them until they reached their relations." 3 In the spaces between theft and destruction, care and preservation sustain members of the Sauk peoples, and Black Hawk shows himself in this moment as much an arbiter of peace as he is of warfare. 4 Furthermore, his interruption of this moment of care suggests that some of the most pressing acts of violation within his story include the very conditions under which he was narrating.

As an aging prisoner of war at the hands of the US government, Black Hawk registers the individuated effects of historic and far-reaching violence that the US government waged on Sauk and Meskwaki relations and communities. These registered effects include the fluctuations of Black Hawk's changing memory and the "buzzing in my ears" that resulted from his "late visit to the white people" and that may have caused "some parts of my story out of place." Furthermore, this interruption bears evidence of the disruption of Black Hawk's own storytelling process: thanks to the "buzzing" and changing memory, Black Hawk warns, he "may give some parts of my story out of place."

Narrating this story, this passage suggests, becomes akin to the process of patching communities and relations back together in the interstices of warfare. Black Hawk's interruption may also represent a need to "give some parts … out of place," or the suggestion that dis-order may be the only way to tell this story. Here, I draw from historian Susan Burch's deliberate "'disrupt[ion]'" of the organizational logic that narrative forces attempt to impose upon Native lives and stories. 5 Black Hawk's warning about "some parts of my story" perhaps being "out of place" speaks to his understanding of a sense of stories being in place, of a sense of narrative structure that supposedly gives order to a story. In this way, Black Hawk's interruption is an implicit challenge to linear, Western storytelling practices. 6 The interruption is also a moment in which he deliberately references the fluctuations in hearing, in memory, and in storytelling capacity that come as a result of white encroachment and theft of cognitive and sensory function, of Sauk land, and of Sauk relations of support.

This "buzzing" and "noise" is built into both Black Hawk's narrative and into its critical reception. Until recently, the bulk of scholarship on Life highlights questions of authenticity. The printed text is a result of several layers of dictation, translation, transcribing, and publication on the parts of a government interpreter, the French-Canadian-Potawatomi Antoine LeClare, and newspaperman John B. Patterson. Critics have used these layers of mediation to cast doubt on the accuracy of the narrative, continuing to work within a framework of "authenticity" that suffused nineteenth-century reviews and reception of the narrative. 7 Recently, however, Native American literary scholars Eric Gary Anderson and Melissa Adams-Campbell suggest that questions of "authenticity" tear away at Native acts of preservation and of cultural memory. Anderson seeks to revise "the prevailing critical emphasis on the white editor's mediation" because such an emphasis "risks crowding out attention to the ways the text exemplifies and practices a primarily indigenous rhetoric." 8 Placing the printed text and spoken act of telling as fundamentally conflicting narrative techniques denies what Adams-Campbell identifies as the ability of Native traditions to adapt and change according to the demands of the storytelling circumstance. Adams-Campbell prioritizes "the collective, even collaborative evocation of Sauk and Mesquakie experiences of dispossession and removal contained in Life," understanding the text as a "Sauk and Mesquakie archive" rather than as Black Hawk's independent testimony. 9

Adams-Campbell's interpretation of Life as an archive is a guiding framework of the reading that I suggest here: rather than existing as a text, Black Hawk's narrative is instead a continued process, a sustained utterance, that the Sac and Fox Nation continues to call upon. Black Hawk's interruption of his text, at the moment in which he attempts to repair family and community, and his registering via that interruption of the violation of his own capacities to tell the stories of violated communities, suggests the ways in which the mediators, too, become part of the "noise" and "buzzing" that Black Hawk is so deliberate to record. That "noise" and "buzzing" was and continues to be part of his narrative itself. As I suggest in the next section, the mediating presences that have been so overbearing on Black Hawk's narrative and on critical reception of this narrative also are part of the multilayered and entangled processes of settler colonialism.

III. With this interruption, Black Hawk witnesses the ongoing structure of settler colonialism at work both in the history of Sauk and Meskwaki dealings with the US government and in his own state of mind as he recounts this history. By interrupting his narrative and by forewarning a story "out of place," Black Hawk also ensures that the printed record of his text will bear evidence of settler colonial-induced fluctuation and impairment. For settler colonialism, as scholars have argued, requires order. Social researcher and historian Lorenzo Veracini, for example, demonstrates that settler colonialism is a system that works toward the semblance of "settled." From discrediting to outright erasure, settler colonialism, according to Veracini, is a structure "shaped by a recurring need to disavow the presence of indigenous 'others.'" And yet, as Veracini notes, even after settler colonialism has run its desired course, "unsettling anxieties remain." 10 No disavowal or erasure is complete if and when resistance causes disruption and disorder.

Black Hawk's interruption of a text initially published for and widely received by white audiences forces this "unsettling anxiety" into the reading process. As Black Hawk's narrative presents them, these "unsettling anxieties" take the form of fluctuating sensory and narrative capacity. While this apparent impairment might function to disable his text, to prevent it from meeting the Western standards of cohesion and order that settler colonial histories require, I suggest that this impairment instead becomes a method of recording multi-layered settler colonial violence. Registering impairment attests to Black Hawk's challenging of the large-scale forces of settler colonialism that attempt to erase Sauk and Meskwaki land claims and lives. It also attests to his refusal and inability to be settled or to allow his story to be subsumed into a seamless narrative. I note this mention of apparent impairment in Black Hawk's text certainly not as an attempt to "diagnose" Black Hawk's condition at the time of the narrative's telling. Rather, following the work of disability studies theorists Julie Avril Minich and Jina B. Kim, I read the disruptions in sensory and memory capacity as an "extension of" the settler colonial processes that robbed Black Hawk and his communities of land and its resources, waged war in the face of his resistance, incarcerated him as a prisoner of war, and paraded him on display for largely white urban audiences. 11

Black Hawk's interruption does not allow us to account for fluctuation and impairment solely under the rubric of individual disability. Instead, Black Hawk's interruption requires us to understand any impairment as part of the work of settler colonialism. Because settler colonialism requires the disavowal of Indigenous societies, it operates through a framework by which, as historian Adria L. Imada writes, those societies are "always already figured and constituted as disabled." 12 Black Hawk registers impairment in order to ensure that this disabling becomes part of the story of settler colonialism and to prevent any easy, cohesive order of settler colonial records. Moreover, calling attention to any impairment that he experiences as a result of settler colonial structures offers one way of recognizing how disability and settler colonialism work together in the production of texts, stories, written memories, and histories. Settler-colonial induced impairment necessitates disorder and "parts out of place," a disorder that, in the life and afterlife of Black Hawk's text, refuses to be seamlessly subsumed into the history of settler colonialism. Just as Black Hawk recounts the relations of support and care that were rebuilt in the wake of settler colonial violence, his narrative also seeks to register the fluctuations and fracturing through storytelling out of place.

IV. If Life of Black Hawk is, as literary scholar Melissa Adams-Campbell has argued, an archive of Sauk documents, stories, and memories, then Life may also deliberately preserve information about the dynamic of settler colonial-induced impairment. These forces surrounding and within Black Hawk's narrative in turn demonstrate a relationship between the methods and contents of settler colonial and disability archives. Settler colonial records, as Adams-Campbell, Indigenous scholar Ashley Glassburn Falzetti, and Native American literary scholar Courtney Rivard write, face a structural problem of how to account for Native populations that are part of the nation-state. As the authors maintain, "in the settler state, information collected about colonized others is not organized separately from the rise of the state; rather, the story of the dispossession and dispersal of indigenous peoples is subsumed within the story of the state." Texts like Black Hawk's Life, as well as other non-textual Native artifacts, accounts, or materials, are rendered an "indistinct and antiquated pre-history of the seemingly natural and inevitable settler state." 13 According to the logic of settler colonial archives, Native presences within these archives are figured as part of the rise of the nation-state; they do not exist separate from nation-building trajectories. This is the lens that settler colonialism attempts to direct toward its records: Native presences exist only within the framework of settler nationhood.

A similar dynamic appears in disability and media theorist Gracen Brilmyer's assessment of the place of disability within archives. Impairment, Brilmyer suggests, often only appears through ableist lenses at work in collecting, cataloging, and making accessible archival holdings. While "searching for traces of disability" in museum archives, Brilmyer observes that these traces are largely absent and omitted. 14 When they do appear, they exist under ableist categories, rubrics, and organizational frameworks that focus on impairment with little evidence of life beyond that impairment, or of how the individual understood, figured, and experienced that impairment. Similar to settler colonial archives that seek to determine and single-handedly control the terms through which Native presences appear in records, so too do the archives of disability seek to determine the scope of what we may recognize, know, and understand about disability. If settler colonialism assumes indigenous populations to be "always already … disabled," then Life of Black Hawk and its critiques also register settler colonialism's efforts to disorder and even—by virtue of questions of "authenticity"—to erase Black Hawk's story and Sauk experience. Black Hawk's interruption of his own story deliberately illustrates the ways in which settler colonialism, as it attempts cohesion, order, and organization, instead alters memory, fragments narrative, and precludes clarity.

V. Centering the complexities of disability may also require that we expand the timeline of Life of Black Hawk to account for how twentieth-century Sac and Fox populations have called upon this record of stories-out-of-place as evidence of Native presences and of US injustice toward Native peoples. Over one hundred years after its publication, Life of Black Hawk appeared in the archival records of the Indian Claims Commission (ICC), a twentieth-century US government initiative allegedly designed for reparations. When the US Congress passed the ICC Act in 1946, the federal government purported to negotiate with Native American tribes, bands, and other recognized communities over land. In particular, the ICC sought to address petitions for illegally seized lands, underpayment for lands, or lands taken through duplicitous treaties. Yet monetary compensation—not land—would be the reparations, if any, paid to Native petitioners. As anthropologist Pamela S. Wallace notes, ICC final decisions would also aver that "the tribal way of life was coming to an end." 15 ICC hearings records create an exemplary settler colonial archive: by incorporating Native voices, presences, and petitioners into its records, the ICC attempted to silence them and to suggest that violence and dispossession no longer had any bearing on the present lives of Native peoples and communities. 16 In the 1950s, the ICC accepted Life into evidence as source material for Sac and Fox claims to compensation for stolen lands. 17 Petitioners from the three remaining Sac and Fox bands, gathering from Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa, offered Black Hawk's version of the Black Hawk War as evidence for Sac and Fox originary claims to land before unlawful nineteenth-century treaties diminished their tribal holdings.

The ICC archives seem a continued recording of the "noise" and "buzzing" that Black Hawk registered in Life. Even when Black Hawk "speaks" through passages quoted within ICC transcripts, a team of twentieth-century "authenticators" and mediators crowd these passages with testimony to the legitimacy and accuracy of Black Hawk's account. The ICC refers to historian Ellen C. Whitney, "an expert witness testifying for the Sac and Fox petitioners." Whitney, whom the ICC transcript identifies as "probably the outstanding authority in the United States on this subject," amassed, edited, and annotated "about 2,000 documents as a result of a comprehensive search" for materials held within the Illinois State Historical Library related to Black Hawk and "his" war. 18 The text of Life in the ICC archive was not edited by Sac and Fox petitioners but instead came from a version published in 1916, edited by historian Milo Milton Quaife. Quaife himself speaks within the ICC transcript, noting that "Black Hawk's description of the disgraceful affair is substantially correct." 19 Following Pamela Wallace's observation that the ICC committee brought together unlikely communities based on the authentication process, Quaife's siding with the authenticity of Black Hawk's version of events illustrates a complexity of the settler colonial archive. While Quaife's verification of Black Hawk's account bolstered Sac and Fox petitioners' claims, Black Hawk's narrative still underwent layers of authentication alongside arbiters of state-sanctioned history, as Whitney's role within the Illinois State Historical Library demonstrates. This amassing of documented "proof" continues the "noise" and "buzzing" that Black Hawk registered from his "time with the whites" over one hundred years before the ICC hearings. While the ICC awarded petitioners from the Sac and Fox Nation with monetary reparations, finding in favor of Sac and Fox claims to the land, the ICC transcripts also demonstrate the ways in which Black Hawk's narrative and the disabling it registers must be authenticated by state arbiters and state documents in order to "count" as evidence.

Here, Gracen Brilmyer's theorizing of a critical disability methodology for archival studies provides a lens for interpreting these ICC records, one that resists a totalizing narrative and that provides a way of reading beneath and around persistent silencing. In attempting to account for 1830s competing claims to land, the ICC quotes a letter from Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War Lewis Cass that warns Black Hawk's war party that "their only chance of preservation is to remain quiet." 20 The ICC's quotation of this letter records a continued threat to twentieth-century Sac and Fox voices and the continuation of settler colonial practices, now archived in the ICC's records. The ICC's larger interest in Sac and Fox petitions, perhaps, is to silence their lingering "grievances." This original silencing and its mimicking in the ICC records have, to use Brilmyer's words, "been shaped by people in power, systems of documentation, and archival processes." 21 But if we, following Brilmyer, read the ICC archives' layered attempts at silencing according to the fluctuation of memory and sensory function that Black Hawk records after his "time with the whites," these attempts to silence, and the "noise" and "buzzing" that threaten to crowd Black Hawk's version of events, become part of the ICC archive. The interruption that Black Hawk inserted into Life provides one possible lens onto settler colonial archives like the ICC: we read the "noise" and "buzzing" that the archive creates, noise that attempts to silence Sac and Fox petitioners by purporting to put a period on Native-US government relations.

Yet, the ICC also records the continued presences of the Sac and Fox bands who organize around Life. Sac and Fox presences within the ICC archive demonstrate the inability to "settle" via silencing. Namely, Black Hawk and his narrative within the ICC hearings both create space for and record community mobilization in the interstices of settler colonial archiving practices. As Wallace writes of the Yuchi community's 1950s ICC petitions, the "ICC petition brought together members of the community for interaction and debate." 22 In the case of the Sac and Fox, bringing Life to the ICC also allowed the bands to bring together the networks of support that Life itself recorded in response to settler colonial violence. The "fluctuations" that become part of Black Hawk's account of his life offer us one way of reading the appearance of Life within the archives: Sac and Fox petitioners present the narrative as evidence because it attests not just to land claims but also to relations of community support, from the 1830s to the 1950s, that refuse to be silenced.

Certainly, the sheer volume of documents that the ICC compiled, recorded, and produced indicates what Wallace identifies as the "tremendous power differential" between Native American petitioners and the structure of the ICC. 23 And yet, within the ICC hearings, Black Hawk's original claim to Sauk land is recorded. The transcript quotes Black Hawk's assertion of the "Two River" country: 24

Sac Rock River village had stood for more than a hundred years, during all of which time we were the undisputed possessors of the valley of the Mississippi, from the Ouisconsin to the Portage des Sioux near the mouth of the Missouri, being about seven hundred miles in length. 25

While the authenticating presences of ICC witnesses and their documents may overwhelm Life of Black Hawk, for twenty-first century Sac and Fox communities, settler colonial archives are not places of total silencing. In the January 2010 issue of the Sac and Fox News, Sac and Fox Historic Preservation Officer Sandra Massey published the second article in a community history series marking 140 years since the Sac and Fox arrival in Oklahoma. Written from the Nation's centralized location in Stroud, 26 Massey's history draws from Life to detail Sac and Fox survival and resistance that led to their current location. Massey asserts that with the publication of Life, Black Hawk "forever placed firsthand Native perspective into the formal record." 27

The act that Massey emphasizes is not the layered editing and mediation that Black Hawk's narrative—and its twentieth-century uses—underwent, but rather the entry of a Native point of view into a "formal record." Whether this "formal record" is nineteenth-century print and publication, twentieth-century archive-building, or the archives of settler colonialism, is not stated. That "firsthand Native perspective"—though it may deliver "parts of the story out of order"— perhaps comes across most clearly in Black Hawk's interruption, in his registering of the "noise" of the formal record itself. And that "noise" and the "perspective" it helps to shape are in the formal record, as Massey emphasizes, "forever." Despite the ICC's efforts to silence, to crowd out Sac and Fox perspectives even as they sought to "verify" them, the ICC settler colonial archives cannot help but attest to that "forever," to the continued perspective. In the interstices of its settler colonial archives, the ICC also records what critical disability theorist Jina B. Kim calls the "relations of social, material, and prosthetic support" that occur when stories are taken out of place, when a twentieth-century band of petitioners asserts presence on land and in records despite the buzz and noise that attempts to silence and crowd memory. The disorder of narrative, in these layered accounts of Black Hawk's narrative, becomes not just a narrative technique, but part of the story itself.

In this way, settler colonial and critical disability archive studies provide methods of interpretation that broaden the parameters of possible reading strategies we bring to texts like Life of Black Hawk. The narrative itself becomes a "relation of support" that has sustained Native communities, conversations, and perspectives within settler colonial archives, despite all the "noise" of these archives that attempt to silence, erase, and disavow. Black Hawk records his sensory and narrative fluctuation not as an apology for a disordered story, and not as a qualifier for "inaccuracies" that might result from memory failure, but rather as a way of narrating and recording that registers at once the histories of settler colonial violence, the entanglement of records through which he narrates, and the relational structures of past, present, and future Sac and Fox community life.