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
Nikki Hessell, "Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry" (SUNY Press, 2021)
Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys, "Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Barrett Holmes Pitner, "The Crime Without a Name: Combatting Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America" (Counterpoint, 2021)
Luis Sierra, "La Paz's Colonial Specters: Urbanization, Migration, and Indigenous Political Participation, 1900-52" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Emalani Case, "Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
Elder Little Brown Bear: Healing Wisdom from a Métis Elder
Patricia E. Rubertone, "Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer, "We Are the Land: A History of Native California" (U California Press, 2021)
Colin Calloway, "The Chiefs Now in This City: Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Peter C. Mancall, "The Trials of Thomas Morton" (Yale UP, 2019)
Association of Asian American Studies Book Awards 2021: Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley and Jan-Henry Gray
Danielle Geller, "Dog Flowers: A Memoir" (One World, 2021)
Patrick Spero, "Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776" (Norton, 2018)
Katrina Phillips, "Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History" (UNC Press, 2021)
Association of Asian American Studies Book Awards 2021: Jian Neo Chen and Quynh Nhu Le
Inside Look: "Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education"
Dave Auckly, et al., "Inspiring Mathematics: Lessons from the Navajo Nation Math Circles" (AMS, 2019)
K. Bunn-Marcuse and A. Jonaitis, "Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast" (U Washington Press, 2020)
Candace Fujikane, "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartography in Hawai'i" (Duke UP, 2021)
Ursula Pike, "An Indian Among Los Indígenas" (Heyday Books, 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