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 key concerns facing the Navajo Nation today: the environmental impact of uranium mining on Diné lands; mental health issues on the reservation; the experiences of LGBT youth in Diné Christian communities; Navajo Nation police responses to domestic violence; and the challenges of economic development in the reservation’s “checkerboard” area, where federal allotment policies have resulted in patchwork patterns of tribal landholdings. All of these issues relate in one way or another to the historical legacy and persistent structures of ongoing US settler colonialism.

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 to Canton in November 1917, this article exposes contested understandings of kin, diagnoses, and remembering. Complex relationships between the three concepts also emerge: medical diagnoses were used to undermine Indigenous kinship, and they complicate remembering. At the same time, remembering—recalling and repopulating the past—offers a way to challenge pathological diagnoses and affirm Native self-determination.

Motivated by disorder, the desire to “disrupt the systematic functioning or neat arrangement of” historical work, this project unsettles the projected objectivity and commonsense logic of U.S. medical diagnoses and institutionalization. It brings to light the violent entanglement of settler colonialism, racism, ableism, and patriarchy and their impact on Native sovereignty, Indigenous kinship, and remembering. Collaborating with relatives of those incarcerated at Canton, and drawing on decolonizing and disability studies methodologies, this work seeks to generate meaningful historical knowledge and new theoretical strategies and perspectives.

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 Utopia has an unproblematic relation to colonialism and that it ignores environmental concerns. In illustrating how different contextualizations of the same passage can produce radically different readings of the text in which it appears, this essay foregrounds issues of interpretation that may be of use to scholars and teachers of literary texts. It concludes that although Utopia can help us acknowledge that environmental and colonial arguments sometimes share similar ethical premises, “Utopian” thinking, in its foregrounding of the difficulties, contradictions, and irresolutions of human interactions, is indispensable to a politics that seeks to imagine a better world.

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. His black-and-white photographs captured the life of the counterculture’s transition to a social movement. His documentation of these counterculture communities has become well known and sought after for both its sheer beauty and as a primary source about a largely undocumented group.

By blending Klein’s unpublished work with essays by modern scholars, Benjamin Klein (Irwin’s nephew) creates an important contribution to the literature of the counterculture and especially the 1960s. Supporting essays emphasize the importance of a visual record for interpreting this lifestyle in the American Southwest. Irwin Klein and the New Settlers reinforces the photographer’s reputation as an astute observer of back-to-the-land, modern-day Emersonians whose communes represented contemporary Waldens.

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 to cut and drive logs. The company found that these workers could be hired cheaply, worked long hours, and, perhaps most importantly, it regarded them as innately suited for logging work. According to company officials, French Canadians were of a “hardy type, accustomed to the work in the bush, such as portaging, running rapids, etc., … [and were] as a rule, pretty high-grade men.” The French Canadian affinity for logging work was recognized all over North America. Adirondack scholar Alfred Donaldson wrote in the 1920s that these people “seemed naturally endowed with the agility, recklessness, and immunity to exposure that must combine to make them expert. They have always predominated as a race in the lumbering operations.” The French from “the settlements,” one Canadian sociologist wrote, “[have] the lure … of the woods tingling in their blood down through the generations.”

From 1850 to 1930 one million Québécois migrated to the US, pushed by rapid population growth, a shortage of good agricultural land, and slow industrial development in their home country. By the 1870s, new rail lines, specifically the Grand Trunk, Québec Central, and the Canadian Pacific accelerated their immigration. By 1901 almost one quarter of the entire population of Québec moved to New England. Ninety-two per cent of these immigrants settled in urban areas in the “border states or in states immediately south of them.^” Even though most settled in urban areas, in the forests along the border and in inland lumber regions of New England and New York there were logging camps composed entirely of French Canadian workers. By 1890, a congressional report found that “American farmers’ sons no longer follow wood chopping for a business, and their places have been filled by the French Canadians.” In 1900, 33.6 per cent of New England “woodchoppers, lumbermen [or] raftsmen” were French Canadian immigrants and the percentage was much higher in the northern portion of the region. Their affinity for the woods made them useful for specific tasks in other rural industries as well. On railroad grades, one sociologist found, the French “prefers to be in the vanguard. The space and freedom of the trail and water routes appeal to him … assisting with ready axe to erect the big log company camps.” When it came to technical work, however, the experts claimed they were useless. These comments on French Canadian loggers are evidence of how the perceived racial hierarchies that were constructed in the US by academics, government, and business officials pushed immigrant workers into specific industries based on their perceived racial characteristics.

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 all life forms including the land. Through a reading of Foucault and Agamben in their use of Aristotle, I want to show how hierarchy as a principle of the political is already implemented in the premise they draw upon for analyzing the biopolitical. In the same way it remains unrecognized in their analysis of biopolitics, this principle also becomes operative within settler colonial logics of life and land. Recently, however, Indigenous scholars and writers have mobilized relationality in its formative characteristic for Indigenous polities and politics as strategy to disrupt biopolitical logics and denaturalize settler colonial rule, which I want to show through engaging Daniel Heath Justice’s Indigenous fantasy trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles as a site of disruptive relationality and political knowledge production.  

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 protagonists begin being called ‘the settlers’ (p. 139). It is a most significant nominal shift. Those who get there first decide to to stay, find a new and better spot than the one they had initially landed on, and like the settlers of old ‘trek’ to it (see p. 147). They even build a wall, like most settlers do (see p. 152). They check the chemical ‘signatures’ (Kim Stanley Robinson always puts science in science fiction) and realise that ‘they did indeed have the place to themselves’ (p. 156). No indigenous lifeforms seem present. But then a turning point: Aurora is proven to be toxic. There is nothing that can be done. The ‘Greenlanders’ (the island the settlers had initially settled was Greenland-shaped; see p. 183) try to get back to the ship. Those still onboard, fearing contamination, refuse re-entry. All the settlers/Greenlanders die (there’s one exception, but having possibly joined by an alien form he will never rejoin humanity).

Then the inhabitants of the ship divide: ‘backers’, those who want to return ‘home’, and ‘stayers’, those who want to terraform another moon somewhere else. The novel and the author take side, they follow those who decide to return ‘home’. The novel is about the protagonists’ (including ‘ship’’s) animus returnandi. The novel is v shaped.

That it is the backers’ animus returnandi that gives meaning to the lives of ship and the other protagonists is confirmed at p. 400. Amidst the ship’s individual stream of consciousness, just before its end, we are told: ‘We had our meaning. We were the starship that came back, that got its people home. That got some fraction of its people home alive. It was a joy to serve’.

They get ‘home’, but Earth for them is not a home and has never been home: the returnees are and will always be ‘exiles’ (p. 412). They are the ‘starfarers’ (p. 419). A genuine antisettler manifesto is uttered by one of the starfarers at a ‘space cadets’ conference:

‘The bottom line is the biomes you can propel at the speeds needed to cross such great distances are too small to hold viable ecologies. The distances between here and truly habitable planets are too great. And the differences between other planets and Earth are too great.  Other planets are either alive or dead. Living planets are alive with their own indigenous life, and dead planets can’t be terraformed quickly enough for the colonizing population to survive the time in enclosure. Only a true Earth twin not yet occupied by life  would allow this plan to work, and these may exist somewhere, the galaxy after all is big, but they are too far away from us. Viable planets, if they exist, are simply too-far-away’ (p. 428; emphasis in original).

There are other factions: the space cadets are rightwingers, Earth has seen what amounts to a kind of white flight to surrounding planets, but there are the ‘Earthfirsters’: they are not moving. The starfarers eventually merge with them. Animus manendi and animus returnandi reconcile. They re-build beaches. Earth is being re-terraformed!

Then the conclusion: ‘There’s no new world, my friend, no / New seas, no other planets, nowhere to flee – / You are tied in a know you can never undo / When you realise Earth is a starship too (p. 445).

Aurora is an Anabasis, a v shaped narrative. Like all Anabases it ends up by the sea. But Aurora is, like all Anabases, made of two voyages, and it is significant that both parts ends by the sea (with a drowning and a near drowning).

For someone who has written the Mars Trilogy, this is a v shaped inversion. And he knows it. The last thought is for ‘delta v’s’ (p. 466).

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 battle flag, he explained in Portuguese, “We’re just revering our ancestors who had the good sense to settle in Brazil.”

At the annual celebration of Brazil’s self-described Confederados one scorching Sunday in April, Confederate flags adorned the hoop-skirted gowns of young belles and the trucker caps worn by beer-guzzling bikers, as well as the graves of pioneers with surnames like McAlpine, Northrup and Seawright.

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Abstract: This article reports on a recent study into the experiences of Indigenous and allied environmental activists with teaching and learning during and as a result of Indigenous environmental movements. This inquiry is grounded in a theoretical framework informed by decolonization and cultural revitalization, social movement learning, and repressive tolerance. Interviews with 10 participants across Canada produced rich insights related to significant life experiences, the tensions encountered by activist educators, the complexity of inter-activist relationships, interaction with police agencies, the plurality of protest, and the revitalization and sharing of Indigenous traditions as the ultimate form of resistance.