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
Jack Glazier, "Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race" (MSU Press, 2020)
Natasha Varner, "La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico" (U Arizona Press, 2020)
John G. Turner, "They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty" (Yale UP, 2020)
Tony Tekaroniake Evans, "Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond" (Washington State UP, 2020)
Justin Gage, "We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020)
Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
Audrey J. Horning, "Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic" (UNC Press, 2017)
Frederick Luis Aldama, "Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)
Julie Gibbings, "Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Agnès Delahaye, "Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England" (Brill, 2020)
Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr., "Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in 18th-Century South America" (UNC Press, 2020)
Charles F. Walker, "Witness to the Age of Revolution: The Odyssey of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Denise E. Bates, "Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
David Tavárez, "The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2011)
Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2000)
Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press 2020)
Sarah Shulist, "Transforming Indigenity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian Amazon" (U Toronto Press, 2018)
Maurice S. Crandall, "These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912" (UNC Press, 2019)
Jean Jackson, "Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia" (Stanford UP, 2019)
Edward C. Valandra, "Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities" (Living Justice Press, 2020)
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