New Books in Native American Studies
Society & Culture
How do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such documentary practices and settler colonial ways of seeing be refused?
Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art (Fordham University Press, 2023) by Dr. Danielle Taschereau Mamers investigates how the Canadian state has used documents, lists, and databases to generate, make visible—and invisible—Indigenous identity. With an archive of legislative documents, registration forms, identity cards, and reports, Dr. Taschereau Mamers traces the political and media history of Indian status in Canada, demonstrating how paperwork has been used by the state to materialise identity categories in the service of colonial governance. Her analysis of bureaucratic artefacts is led by the interventions of Indigenous artists, including Robert Houle, Nadia Myre, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Rebecca Belmore. Bringing together media theories of documentation and the strategies of these artists, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing develops a method for identifying how bureaucratic documents mediate power relations as well as how those relations may be disobeyed and re-imagined.
By integrating art-led inquiry with media theory and settler colonial studies approaches, Dr. Taschereau Mamers offers a political and media history of the documents that have reproduced Indian status. More importantly, she provides us with an innovative guide for using art as a method of theorising decolonial political relations. This is a crucial book for any reader interested in the intersection of state archives, settler colonial studies, and visual culture in the context of Canada’s complex and violent relationship with Indigenous peoples.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Kathleen DuVal, "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America" (Random House, 2024)
Timothy G. Anderson and Brian Schoen, "Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond" (Ohio UP, 2023)
Benjamin Bryce and David M. K. Sheinin, "Race and Transnationalism in the Americas" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
John H. Cable, "Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi" (UP of Kansas, 2023)
Lorenza B. Fontana, "Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Rose Miron, "Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
Annaliese Jacobs Claydon, "Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Brooke Larson, "The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia" (Duke UP, 2023)
Stefan Aune, "Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire" (U California Press, 2023)
John William Nelson, "Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent" (UNC Press, 2023)
Christina Gish Hill et al., "National Parks, Native Sovereignty: Experiments in Collaboration" (U Oklahoma Press, 2024)
Sarah Keyes, "American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
Gregory D. Smithers, "Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)
Emily Legg, "Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907" (Utah State UP, 2023)
Matthew C. Ward, "Making the Frontier Man: Violence, White Manhood, and Authority in the Early Western Backcountry" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
Ian Saxine, "Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier" (NYU Press, 2019)
Deborah Taffa, "Whiskey Tender: A Memoir" (Harper, 2024)
Daniel Immerwahr, "How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States" (FSG, 2019)
Matthew Kruer, "Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America" (Harvard UP, 2021)
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