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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David Veevers, "The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire" (Ebury Press, 2023)
James V. Fenelon, "Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790" (Routledge, 2023)
Peter Stark, "Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation" (Random House, 2023)
Alejandra Dubcovsky, "Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South" (Yale UP, 2023)
Indigenous DC: A Conversation with Elizabeth Rule
Tariq D. Khan, "The Republic Shall be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
Chelsea T. Hicks, "A Calm and Normal Heart: Stories" (The Unnamed Press, 2022)
Edgar Garcia, "Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
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Juliana Hu Pegues, "Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements" (UNC Press, 2021)
Stephen Aron, "Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Erika Marie Bsumek, "The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau" (U Texas Press, 2023)
Matthew Bentley and John D. Bloom, "The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
Stefan Rinke, "Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Linda J. Seligmann, "Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
Jean Pfaelzer, "California, a Slave State" (Yale UP, 2023)
Lin Poyer, "War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
The Meat and Bones of Life
Ailton Krenak, "Life Is Not Useful" (Polity Press, 2023)
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