In this response to a provocation from Natalie Oswin, “An Other Geography,” Sara Smith and I write in “Against colonial grounds”, that we need to critically rethink institutions of higher learning. We need to examine how disciplines and universities are complicit in the reproduction of colonial histories and myths of white supremacy. We argue that if we take indigenous geographies seriously, we’d conceptually have the tools to think though many of today’s pressing moral, ethical, and political problems, from border walls to environmental sustainability. We also reflect on our location as participants in this system within a university in the U.S. South and how this adds to racism and anti-Black violence. The abstract below does a better job a summarizing the commentary.
“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.”
I will discuss my recent trip to Standing Rock for a lunch conversation at the Department of Geography next Thursday.