Abstract
In this response to Natalie Oswin’s provocation, ‘An other geography’, we consider how we might work against settler narratives and structures from our situated positions in the discipline and in a specific academic institution in the US South. Following Diné student Majerle Lister, we ask what it would mean to consider giving the land back: what does that entail? The academic institutions we inhabit were built to insure white futurity, on fictive histories. Can they be retrofitted in the present to enable the futurity of Indigenous people and theorizations? Can we turn our discipline’s history of erasure inside out, to center the land, people, and practices that were both crucial to and absent from it except as shadowy and metaphorical presences? We draw on our own teaching, and from scholarship in Indigenous and Black Studies, to consider what it might look like to return land and reconfigure relations among those who have been cast aside by white patriarchal settler structures, but in incommensurate ways.
At the time of this writing, Trump is ignoring the usual liberal celebrations of Native American Heritage Month for a cornball and intentionally provocative ‘Founders Month’. Yet citizens of the more than 560 nations in the contested territoriality of the United States are not surprised by such self-delusionary histories. Trump is a particularly obnoxious manifestation of the tradition of white supremacy, but his administration is more the rule than the exception. In this response to Oswin’s (2020) provocation, we build on Tuck and Yang’s (2012) insistence that decolonization must not be metaphorical and think through the university setting as a place and set of practices that deny Indigenous presence. Majerle Lister, a Diné PhD geography student in our department, recently wrote on Twitter, ‘when I am reading white academics [who are] writing about decolonization…I rarely see them write anything close to “give them the land back”’. Lister’s quip directs our focus to the real and material conditions of Indigenous peoples and nations whose lands were stolen in the erection of institutions of higher learning. Universities were built on sites of pillage. In the United States, land grant universities became technical centers for settler-colonial extension work. Congress passed the Morrill Act of 1862 at the same time that the US military was on a genocidal campaign against the Diné. Land grant coordinated with land theft.
Geographers need to grapple with the legacies of our institutions as well as the ongoing colonial projects in which we are engaged. What does it mean for a university, on stolen Indigenous land, to send development specialists around the world? To seek out social change on the insistence of a kind of technical expertise that happens to align with capitalistic advancement? There is more than symbolism at work; there is a perpetuation of the logics of white supremacy and imperialism. Giving the land back means fundamentally challenging US colonial premises and reorienting our practices to support, and not conquer, peoples.
We write this response to Oswin from our grounding in a university in the US South, where part of our work has been to attend student protests against a Confederate monument and to struggle to make an institution that was designed for white elite settler men into a place in which minoritized young people and scholars can flourish. Although the south is often understood in Black and White terms, University of North Carolina history professor and member of the Lumbee Tribe, Melinda Maynor Lowery (2018), writes that Indigenous peoples were the original ‘southerners’ and Indigenous perspectives must be part of the understanding of decolonizing legacies of colonialism and Confederate histories. The ideals of such universities are already mired in fiction, in that their lofty ambitions were undergirded by the exploitation and sale of human beings. Their aspirations to a storied past are founded in lineages of European history, told in such a way that more is erased than spoken.
In an always unfinished struggle to retrofit this place to encompass a world it was designed to prevent, it is not enough to add voices to the canon, or to bring new people into the room. These steps can lead to a sense of progress and shared goals, but they cannot address the root issues at hand: that the university’s buildings sit on stolen land; that the storied histories that universities tell themselves and their students about knowledge and liberty are entangled in the ways that the history of these concepts developed in relation to enslavement and persecution (Wilderson, 2010); and that this is not a problem of the past, but one of the present and future. When our institutions and disciplines have been built to service a white future, how might we reorganize them for a future that is prefigured by the work of Black student activists, Indigenous scholars, migrant workers, and others? The language of diversity and inclusion can be folded into the progress narratives that themselves misunderstand time and history. The celebration of traditional knowledge and epistemologies can become one chapter in a book or be the basis of a white scholar’s career. But what about the flesh and blood Native scholar in the academy? What about the university’s relations to sovereign tribes? And its relation to state structures of empire? What do you say to the student who asks: why don’t white academics ever talk about just giving the land back?
Indigenous is not just epistemic difference
Oswin (2020) brings forward important critiques of geography, a ‘science’ that originated in colonialism and imperialism. The imagination of the first non-Native cartographers as they ‘explored’ ‘new’ lands was pregnant with intentions of genocide and slavery. As Tiffany Lethabo King (2018) argues, this could be found even in the cartouche of the maps produced during the so-called ‘age of discovery’. These moments are easy to catalog in the robust scholarship on settler colonialism. Yet, foregrounding settlers’ maps and intentions misses Indigenous geographies and much richer understandings of these places. We need a geography that takes Indigenous practices, knowledges, and politics seriously. Not one that treats white genocidal impulses as an unfortunate symptom of past expansion, but one that centers Indigenous theory and scholarship now and in the future. Indigenous peoples are not just throwaway references in an accounting of crimes perpetuated on this continent; they are nations with political aspirations for sovereignty, self-determination, and liberation.
Geography needs to develop a better understanding of this hemisphere that includes millennia of Indigenous presence, both past and present. Indigenous nations are the people who built this continent, its founders. All others are migrants. The canons of Indigenous geography, what ought to simply be called ‘geography’, are not found in the graves of long dead European elites who happened upon an idea; they are alive in Indigenous thought and philosophies. They are found in the oral histories of Native peoples—a collective and shared memory. When teaching Geographies of Globalization, Curley often starts with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s (2014) An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. In this text, students learn that Indigenous nations moved, traded, and created international agreements between each other prior to 1492. Indigenous peoples shared knowledges and advanced technologies, some of which remain among the most important today, such as corn. Non-Indigenous geographies of the Americas begin their history in the late 15th century, as if Indigenous nations here are peoples without history. These racist histories, geographies, and anthropologies subsume Indigenous presence and practice into the ‘pre-modern’. Indigenous nations do not simply offer insights into how humans looked prior to modern life; rather, these geographies and histories offer alternative political philosophies to the classism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of repression that are a part of the Western tradition. In Habeas Viscus, Weheliye (2014) asks why some can theorize for all, while Black feminist scholars are ‘ethnographically detained’, made to only speak for themselves, confined and contained to one week of class, to one category of theorization. What would it mean to take the theorization of the world found in Native memory as global theory? To center the technological innovations of Indigenous nations as central to intellectual knowledge? Can we decenter white temporalities and move among other dates and other timelines to build new intellectual solidarities among those relegated to footnotes and read as the collateral damage of modernity?
Geography is unquestionably a colonial science. It was meant to document places and people who were in the path of empire. However, there is no truth in imperialism, as Oswin reminds us. Inevitably, fiction replaces fact. Unfortunately, in the United States and other imperial histories of this hemisphere, we follow a trajectory from east to west. But as Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) reminds us, we need not follow the settler, but should ‘follow the corn’ where we can trace this important technology to its source of innovation in Mayan communities. The ramifications of such a geographical orientation is to decolonize the border and recognize that many of the people we call migrants and refugees are the continent’s original inhabitants, with a right to the land. It is imperialism and colonialism that erects borders and justifies violent enforcement of these lines.
Before 1492, Indigenous peoples developed a relationship with the land that included the domestication and movement of animals, slash-and-burn agriculture, fishing, hunting, movement, and trade. There was not wilderness when Europeans arrived but rather robust economies, trade networks, diplomacy, and international relations as well as sustainable development. We need a geography that is accountable to these histories and the contemporary practices within Indigenous nations that they inspired. To center Europe and its westward expansion is to internalize foundational assumptions of an imperialist geography. To celebrate founders’ month is to celebrate Native American history.
Epistemic difference is not the totality of Indigenous experiences. Indigenous peoples are not simply a subaltern, but a people with political claims. Geography needs to be responsive to treaty rights and tribal sovereignty. Why naturalize the political boundaries of the settler state absent Indigenous homelands or even reservation boundaries? This erasure is an erasure of Indigenous peoples. Those of us working in university spaces must hold our institutions accountable for respecting the sovereign rights of tribes, which include recognition of tribal institutional review boards and data management agreements that will partner with tribal institutions on use and access of research conducted in tribal homelands or with tribal membership. A geography that centered Indigenous politics and practice—that is, not decolonization as metaphor—would be more grounded and enable different kinds of futures. As Weheliye (2014), Wynter (2003), Wilderson (2010), and others have argued, fundamental tenets of the social sciences have been centered on ideas of freedom and humanity that were entangled in enslavement and genocidal practices. Following Oswin (2020), it is not enough to add footnotes to this scholarly lineage; it must be overturned, not only in the narrow confines of course syllabi, but also in day-to-day interactions with one another, and in relation to tribal rights and Indigenous scholars and scholarship. Settler-colonial sovereignty, as invented through the stripping away of Indigenous bodily sovereignty and land, is still centered as a key concept. How can we turn that inside out and not ‘ethnographically detain’ Indigenous practices and/as theorizations?
As we dream and prefigure an ‘Other’ geography, the path is not clear and it is not easy. How can we decenter the whiteness that has created this othering itself? Our experiences of minoritization are not commensurable though they may have been made through resonant practices of white patriarchal violence. How can we build new relations that do not evacuate the very different situated positions of Indigenous peoples, racialized others, and those who have been marginalized in incommensurate ways? And how can we account for their intersectional positionalities in relation to economic class privilege, gender, and sexual orientation (Crenshaw, 1991), rather than fix them into a too simplistic constellation that is figured in relation to whiteness alone? Can we create solidarities across very different experiences? While some might argue that white women, for example, have been marginalized in certain spaces, they simultaneously benefit from white supremacy: thus, Smith can challenge students on racial violence and white supremacy in part because she simultaneously is benefiting from her own position as a white person. What would a university look like built not on land theft and erasure, but active partnerships with Indigenous nations? What does it mean to give the land back?
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.