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
Janne Lahti, "The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives" (Routledge, 2019)
Farina King, "The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century" (UP of Kansas, 2018)
William Kelso, "Jamestown: The Truth Revealed" (U Virginia Press, 2017)
Alexander S. Dawson, "The Peyote Effect: From the Inquisition to the War on Drugs" (U California Press, 2018)
Joe Jackson, "Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary" (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2016)
Pamela E. Klassen, "The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
K. Fullagar and M. A. McDonnell, "Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)
Joshua Reid, "The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs" (Yale UP, 2015)
Brenden W. Rensink, "Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands" (Texas A&M UP, 2018)
Mark Rice, "Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru" (UNC Press, 2018)
Noenoe K. Silva, "Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History" (Duke UP, 2017)
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)
Kathleen Hull and John Douglass, "Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California" (U Arizona Press, 2018)
Yael Ben-zvi, “Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories” (Dartmouth College Press, 2018)
Kiara M. Vigil, “Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880-1930” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
David C. Posthumus, “All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual” (U Nebraska Press, 2018)
Cameron B. Strang, “Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850” (UNC Press, 2018)
B. P. Owensby and R. J. Ross, “Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America” (NYU Press, 2018)
Jorge Coronado, “Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950” (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)
Christina Snyder, “Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson” (Oxford UP, 2017)
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