Abstract: By the end of the seventeenth century, Anglo-Americans on both sides of the Atlantic accepted the importance of surveying to any system of land ownership. Most historians of colonial British have similarly taken colonial surveying practices as a given. This article complicates these assumptions through an examination of Pennsylvania in a wider context. In […]

Excerpt: I read the books I review in this essay throughout the summer of 2015, right after I finished teaching a writing course at a tribal college on the Navajo Nation where I have periodically taught and researched over the last several years. The topics my students chose to write about offer a snapshot of […]

Abstract: “Disorderly Pasts” centers on life stories from South Dakota’s Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric hospital for American Indians. Between 1902 and 1933, the Asylum detained nearly four hundred Indigenous men, women, and children from more than fifty Native nations. Focusing especially on the experiences of Menominee people collectively stolen from their homes in Wisconsin […]

Abstract: This deliberately presentist essay uses More’s Utopia to contribute to the debate over the relationship between environmentalism and postcolonialism; explore the relationship between a text’s contexts and “meaning(s)”; and illustrate how utopian thinking can expose contradictions underlying other forms of imagining better worlds. Contextualizing Utopia with two different twenty-first-century comparators, it interrogates assumptions that […]

Description: Dropouts, renegades, utopians. Children of the urban middle class and old beatniks living alone, as couples, in families, or as groups in the small Nuevomexicano towns. When photographer Irwin Klein began visiting northern New Mexico in the mid-1960s, he found these self-proclaimed New Settlers—and many others—in the back country between Santa Fe and Taos. […]

Excerpt: In 1853 the Brown Company was a small water-powered sawmill in Berlin, New Hampshire, but by the turn of the century it had become a highly successful lumber and paper-processing company which made some of the largest timber cuts in the Northeast US. Its success depended largely on the French Canadian immigrant labourers employed […]

Abstract: This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of […]

My notes: The project was a typically settler colonial one: crisis, climate change, a decision to get out, settling. Aurora’s first and second sections follow a typical settler colonial narrative: going out, the Tau Ceti system, settling a particular Earth-like satellite: Aurora. Once they get there, once they actually land in the new world, the […]

Excerpt: On a stage festooned with Confederate flags, a singer was belting out “Dixieland Delight” by Alabama near an obelisk honoring the Americans who fled to this outpost in the aftermath of the Civil War. “We’re not racists,” said Cícero Carr, 54, an engineer whose great-great-grandfather hailed from Texas. Wearing a fedora featuring the rebel […]

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