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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Stephanie Elizondo Griest, “All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands” (UNC Press, 2017)
Seth Archer, “Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778-1855” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner, “Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas” (Yale UP, 2018)
Louis Warren, “God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America” (Basic Books, 2017)
Jenny Hale Pulispher, “Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England” (Yale UP, 2018)
Christina Gish Hill, “Webs of Kinship: Family in Northern Cheyenne Nationhood” (U Oklahoma Press, 2017)
Allan Greer, “Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
William S. Kiser, “Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle Over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2017)
Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792” (UNC Press, 2018)
Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Comanche Empire” (Yale UP, 2008)
Kirstin Squint, “LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature” (LSU Press, 2018)
Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood” (U Chicago Press, 2017)
Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (Princeton UP, 2016)
Daniel Heath Justice, “Why Indigenous Literatures Matter” (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018)
Matthew Restall, “When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History” (Ecco, 2018)
Dawn Peterson, “Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion” (Harvard UP, 2017)
Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala” (U Arizona Press, 2015)
Mark Rifkin, “Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination” (Duke UP, 2017)
Jennifer Graber, “The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West” (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Colin G. Calloway, “The Indian World of George Washington” (Oxford UP, 2018)
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