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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Beth H. Piatote, “Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature” (Yale University Press, 2013)
Lance R. Blyth, “Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880” (Nebraska UP, 2012)
Andrew Newman, “On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
Joy Porter, “Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America” (University of Nebraska Press, 2011)
Frederick E. Hoxie, “This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made” (Penguin, 2012)
Colin Calloway, “Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth” (Dartmouth College Press, 2012)
Linford Fisher, “The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America” (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, “Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after Civil War” (UNC Press, 2012)
Amy Lonetree, “Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums” (University of North Carolina, 2012)
Brendan C. Lindsay, “Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
Angela Pulley Hudson, “Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South” (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)
Kate Buford, “Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe” (Bison Books, 2012)
Christina Snyder, “Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America” (Harvard UP, 2010)
Nicolas Rosenthal, “Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles” (University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
Gregory McNamee, “The Only One Living to Tell: The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian” (University of Arizona Press, 2012)
Matthew Dennis, “Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)
Scott Morgensen, “Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
Jodi A. Byrd, “The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
Hayes Peter Mauro, “The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School” (University of New Mexico Press, 2011)
Erica Prussing, “White Man’s Water: The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community” (University of Arizona Press, 2011)
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