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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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)
Mark Santiago, "A Bad Peace and A Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799" (U Oklahoma Press, 2018)
David R. B. Beck, "Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)
Ryan Hall, "Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877" (UNC Press, 2020)
David Tavárez, "Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America" (U Colorado Press, 2017)
JoAnna Poblete, "Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Samoa" (U Hawai’i Press, 2020)
Mary Kathryn Nagle, "Sovereignty" (Northwestern UP, 2020)
Wade Davies, "Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970" (UP of Kansas, 2020)
Walter Johnson, "The Broken Heart of America" (Basic Books, 2020)
Nick Estes, "Our History is the Future" (Verso, 2019)
Allan Downey, "The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood" (UBC Press, 2018)
A. D. Crosby and M. B. Lykes, "In Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm" (Rutgers UP, 2019)
Thomas John Lappas, "In League Against King Alcohol" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020)
Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)
Nancy Mattina, "Uncommon Anthropologist: Gladys Reichard and Western Native American Culture" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)
Shay Welch, "The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)
Claudio Saunt, "Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory" (Norton, 2020)
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