Pillars of Process

This chapter explores Muriel Rukeyser's unfinished work on Franz Boas and her engagement with cultural anthropology and indigenous knowledge systems that would be foundational for the work she was producing in the Cold War period. The chapter tells how this gave her new modes and histories to think through and helped her find a language of process that she would use to describe the experience of birth and motherhood. By examining Rukeyser's work on Boas, it also shows the long influence of indigenous thought on midcentury feminism and the aesthetics of the modernist avant-garde. The chapter then traces the legacies of American experimentalism and political radicalism to the ideas and practices of the First Nations peoples. The chapter concludes by noting that Rukeyser's unfinished work on Boas is key to understanding the conditions of her fragmented midcentury life. However, its unfinished nature also shows how her work continued to develop and grow despite the lattice of anticommunist and anti-woman strictures that she would learn to work around and through. A history that becomes visible only as you follow her in and out of the archives.