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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies
Megan Kate Nelson, "Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America" (Scribner, 2022)
Linda LeGarde Grover, "Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
Kyle T. Mays, "An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2021)
Jennifer Scheper Hughes, "The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas" (NYU Press, 2021)
Paulette F. C. Steeves, "The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Fay A. Yarbrough, "Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country" (UNC Press, 2021)
Philip J. Deloria, "Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract" (U Washington Press, 2019)
Samantha Seeley, "Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States" (UNC Press, 2021)
Aldona Jonaitis, "Art of the Northwest Coast," Second Edition (U Washington Press, 2021)
Kevin Bruyneel, "Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States" (UNC Press, 2021)
Margaret D. Jacobs, "After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands" (Princeton UP, 2021)
James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely, "Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)
Marilyn Lake, "Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform" (Harvard UP, 2019)
Efrén O. Pérez, "Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Alaina E. Roberts, "I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Andrea Warner, "Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography" (Graystone Books, 2018)
Dina Gilio-Whitaker, "As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock" (Beacon Press, 2019)
Roberto J. González, "Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network" (U California Press, 2020)
Nathaniel Morris, "Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico's Gran Nayar, 1910-1940" (U Arizona Press, 2020)
A. S. Dillingham, "Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2021)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies