“after the whole army was turned out…”

“after the whole army was turned out…”

for title, quotation, and photo (2023)

top image description: Smoke from distant global-warming-exacerbated wildfires manifests as haze and reduced visibility in a panoramic view of a lake on the occupied lands of the Seneca Nation. On the right side of the image are houses, docks, and boats, with a US flag waving in the wind in the center of the image.

bottom image description: The following text is printed on a blurred photo of the same lake: “At 6 o’clock in the morning of the 15th of September, the whole army was turned out to destroy the crops, orchards, houses and gardens of the place. The corn was piled up in the houses and burned with them, or consumed on log heaps. It was estimated that from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand bushels were destroyed at this place… the abundant harvest destroyed, the trees hewn down, and naught of the great town remain-ing but smoking ruins and blackened logs…”

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Statement

content note: verbal references to colonizing violence and environmental catastrophe

This piece juxtaposes two found sources:

1. A textual account of the US army’s burning of “Chenese”/“Ginnacee Castle” (as written in Roman script in contemporaneous settler sources), a major center of the Seneca Nation and Haudenosaunee Confederacy, near land currently illegally occupied by the settler colonial town of Geneseo, NY, during the 1779 scorched-earth US Sullivan-Clinton-Brodhead campaign.
2. A 2023 photo of occupied Seneca/Haudenosaunee land not far from the location of the burning, in which smoke from distant “wild” fires—whose historically unprecedented intensity is likely due to global warming—is visible.

after the whole army was turned out:

1. The settler imperial US project consolidated a legal-discursive regime founded on the forcible positioning of sovereign Indigenous peoples and Lands as “Indian.” For Indigenous studies scholar Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw Nation), to be positioned as Indian is to be placed “in transit”—that is, to be positioned “in motion, to exist liminally in the ungrievable spaces of suspicion and unintelligibility.” In Byrd’s analysis, the “making Indian” of colonized peoples has long functioned as a central “transit” that underpins US imperialism: “the United States has used executive, legislative, and juridical means to make ‘Indian’ those peoples and nations who stand in the way of U.S. military and economic desires,” from the colonization of Turtle Island Indigenous nations to the Monroe Doctrine to the unending post-9-11 “war on terror.”
2. The settler imperial logic of “making Indian” was imposed not only on occupied peoples, but also on more-than-human entities. For Byrd, “the transit of empire… depends upon the language, grammar, and ontological category of Indianness to enact itself as the United States continues its global wars on terror, the environment, and livability.” In this assault on the earth on a planetary scale, the US directs the harms of its extractive, toxic activities towards Indigenous, Black, and Global South peoples, who are “made Indian” in the process. For Black studies scholar Kathryn Yusoff, these activities are “predicated on the presumed absorbent qualities of [Indigenous,] black and brown bodies to take up the body burdens of exposure to toxicities and to buffer the violence of the earth.” Indeed, this racializing geographic logic underwrites global warming: fossil-fuel-driven climate breakdown is perpetrated by and accords greatest benefits to the imperial core, even while its harms are directed most acutely at Black, Indigenous, and Global South peoples and Lands. This racializing geography likewise undergirds present-day global-warming-exacerbated “wild” fires on occupied Turtle Island, whose record-breaking intensity is the result of settler colonial land management and of the imperial core’s fossil fuel consumption, even while the fires’ toxic effects are felt most severely by rural Indigenous peoples as well as urban Indigenous, Black, racially-marginalized, poor, disabled, and queer/trans people(s). 

The photo’s indexing of the toxicity of global-warming-exacerbated fires on land in (a settler colony of) the imperial core registers a process in which, for decolonial poet and writer Aime Césaire, “colonialist procedures which until [now] had been reserved exclusively for” peoples and Lands colonized by Western imperialism are “applied to” the imperial core. Then, through a montage of text and image, the piece indexes and links 1) the burning of Ginnacee Castle, a threshold moment in the codification of US settler imperial tactics and political logics, 2) the increasingly global impact of US settler imperialism, and 3) the reverberation of settler imperial tactics and logics back to the (lands illegally occupied by the) US “homeland.”