Frontiers Augmented highlights selected authors from our issues to create a means for deeper engagement with the content published in the Frontiers Journal. The most recent issue 46.3, edited by Frontiers Co-Editors Debjani Chakravarty, Wanda S. Pillow, and Sarita Gaytán, highlights author Jordan Lea Johnson, Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cottey College.
I don’t remember the first time I heard the story of Angelina. Growing up in East Texas, she was always there: the Angelina River, Angelina National Forest, Angelina County. I do recall that it was by reading the work of Native feminist thinkers such as Paula Gunn Allen and Jean O’Brien that I grew more curious about the implications of the stories we tell about place, belonging, and history. About the capacity of such stories to create and destroy worlds.
Archival work has the power to estrange the everyday logic we’ve been asked to accept, troubling the normalization of injustice by revealing how what’s been routinely presented as natural or inevitable is actually propped up through a wide range of practices and ideologies. And that’s what I’ve tried to do with this project. “Angelina in the Archives: Tracing Heteropatriarchy and Settler Colonialism in Local Histories of the Pineywoods” takes up 18th century and more contemporary representations of a Caddo woman baptized as Angélique by Spanish missionaries, asking how the story of Angelina romanticizes the history of colonization while normalizing a present defined by settler occupation. In this case, the archive includes historical texts as well as murals, paintings, magazines, and government webpages. And looking for Angelina across such sites highlights how archives can be spaces of illumination as well as erasure. Settler stories remove Angelina from Caddo community and cosmology, placing her within a progress narrative that culminates in the colonization of Caddo homelands. The settler archive has very little to say about her life–her actual name is not even recorded–but it has a lot to say about how the logic of settler colonialism attaches to a specific place and shapes local configurations of history and identity.
I hope that the article makes a small contribution to ongoing conversations about how stories and their retellings can function as sites of violence as well as resistance. I critique Texas Parks and Wildlife for “celebrating” Angelina as the “Pineywoods Pocahontas” in the article, but the issue of Indigenous representation within historical narratives has only grown more vexed amidst federal mandates to expunge critiques of colonialism from official narrations of US history.[1] As we continue to navigate intensifying forms of state censure and surveillance, I think it remains important to ask about how narratives of progress couched in multiculturalism and liberal models of inclusion have contributed to the present moment. How “positive” stereotyping, tokenization, and cooptation are insidious mechanisms of the capitalist settler state, enabling the spectacles of violence we see today.
I also hope that this piece invites questions about the narratives and naming practices that have become normalized in other spaces. The story of Angelina constitutes a rich site of analysis, not because it’s unique, but because it’s so emblematic of how settler histories erase Native pasts and foreclose on Native futures. We see similar patterns and tropes across the North American continent. And I think the intricacies of the particular can reveal wider patterns related to how settler storytelling practices draw on heteropatriarchal ideas about gender and sexuality to normalize colonialism. The past, like the present, is so much more complex than we sometimes give it credit for. And I hope to show that outcomes are never inevitable; the story is not fully written. It can be complicated, contested, reworked to cultivate less violent presents and futures.
[1] Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, Executive Order (2025). https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history/.
Jordan Lea Johnson holds a PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies with a concentration in environmental studies from Emory University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cottey College in Missouri. Her research draws on queer ecology, feminist science studies, and critical settler colonial studies to examine issues of epistemology and ethical responsibility within projects of resource management, cultural preservation, and ecological restoration on postindustrial sites. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and the Journal of Posthumanism.