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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Sarah Deutsch, "Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898-1940" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
Dustin Tahmahkera, "Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
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Ryan Hall, "Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877" (UNC Press, 2020)
Samuel J. Redman, "Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Paul Conrad, "The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Mark R. Anderson, "Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)
Kelly Bauer, "Negotiating Autonomy: Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
Anne F. Hyde, "Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West" (Norton, 2022)
Shawn Michael Austin, "Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay" (U New Mexico Press, 2020)
Nitasha Tamar Sharma, "Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific" (Duke UP, 2021)
Tessa Murphy, "The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Thomas F. Thornton and Madonna L. Moss, "Herring and People of the North Pacific: Sustaining a Keystone Species" (U Washington Press, 2021)
Martin Rizzo-Martinez, "We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
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