“Perpetrator, the safest city in America”

for edited found text and optional images (2025)

This piece exists as:

-a printed text to be read (available HERE)

-a live reading of a printed text concurrent with video (a montage of still images)

-additional versions forthcoming

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Statement

content note: discussion of relations of settler colonialism and imperialism, and violent tactics thereof (starvation, disease, sanctions)

This piece reckons with how the banalization of violence underwrites the US project, by tracing the banalization of a watershed figure in British and US imperialism, Field Marshal Jeffrey Amherst. As commander of British forces engaged in counterinsurgency against the 1763 revolt of allied Turtle Island Indigenous nations spearheaded by Odawa Nation leader Pontiac, the Field Marshal stated in official correspondence intent to commit genocide by spreading smallpox among these nations. The Field Marshal also appears to have acted on this intent, leading to a smallpox epidemic that had deadly consequences for the Pottawattomi, Miami, Kickapoo, Lenape, Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, Wendat/Wyandot, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muskogee Indigenous nations, consequences which likely played a decisive role in the colonizers’ repression of the revolt. Yet this action’s consequences have not been limited to the eighteenth century. Rather, the Field Marshal’s weaponization of disease opened doors to the US’s later weaponization of disease through sanctions, starvation, and deliberate spreading of the  (colonially- and racially-uneven) covid-19 pandemic, with the second tactic being presently perpetrated with particular intensity against Palestine by US empire’s Zionist outpost. More broadly, the Field Marshal’s weaponization of the earth’s atmosphere (i.e. as a conduit for smallpox) opened possibilities for later violence by Western imperial nations such as large-scale air pollution, global warming, and militarized “air power.” 

The present piece traces, marks, and disrupts the normalizing of the Field Marshal’s name, through attention to the settler colonial town of Amherst, New York, on the sovereign land of the Seneca Nation and Haudenosaunee Confederacy, where I studied and worked for 12 years. This town is but one of many places and institutions across occupied Turtle Island named after the Field Marshal (such as towns in lands known colonially as New York, Massachusetts, and Ontario, an island in “Ontario,” and a college in “Massachusetts”) and after other perpetrators such as Christopher Columbus and George Washington. The present piece samples and edits found writing about occupied Seneca land inscribed colonially as Amherst, NY, specifically sentences which mention the town’s violent name while praising the town’s potential for (settler) safety, health, and wealth. This rhetoric compartmentalizes the town’s settler Good Life from its violent name, and thereby normalizes the American Dream’s violent out-of-sight (to US settlers) imperial conditions of possibility. In order to mark and refuse this normalizing gesture, the sampled sentences are rewritten, with the town’s name replaced by the word “Perpetrator.” Through this reframing, the piece not only contests the town name’s normalizing of the violent, ongoing colonization of sovereign Turtle Island Indigenous peoples and lands, but also implicates banal expressions of the American Dream in this violence.

By de-compartmentalizing the US colonization of Turtle Island from “overseas” US imperialism, the piece responds to Indigenous studies scholar Jodi Byrd’s (Chickasaw Nation) call to map how all aspects of the US “settler imperial” project, including the everyday, are underwritten by the violent positioning of Indigenous and occupied peoples as unsovereign, ungrievable “Indians,” as the US has done Turtle Island to Vietnam to Iraq to Palestine. Through attention to how discourse about the “banal” matter of a place name, in the “banal” space of the settler suburb is founded on the active banalization of settler imperial violence, the piece activates routes for mapping and disrupting the normalization of the US’s ongoing worldwide killing spree. Via a historical, anti-colonial and anti-imperial perspective on the US settler Everyday, the project also offers a model for confronting the historical, “domestic” roots of “overseas” US imperialism in Palestine and beyond, and for doing so without occluding the US’s ongoing occupation of Turtle Island. It is not enough to simply change the names of this and other towns; rather, what is required is a wholesale dismantling of symbolic and other infrastructures which reproduce US settler imperial violence, from police to colonizing place names to ICE to sanitizing history curricula to (US and proxy) militaries, from Turtle Island to Palestine to the Congo.

The piece exists as a self-contained text; it may also be presented alongside images of single-family homes sampled from real estate ads located in land known colonially as Amherst, NY. The addition of images aims to press the piece’s marking of the normalization of violence further into the town’s suburban banality, and thereby draw out parallel colonial relations inherent in US suburban architecture. For historian Patricia Seed, houses (alongside other banal signs such as fences and cultivated land such as lawns) have functioned as key rationalizations for English (and later British, US, and Canadian) colonization of Turtle Island Indigenous lands. Since the initial colonies of the early 1600s, English and later colonizers of Turtle Island have justified their seizure of Indigenous lands through a discourse that organized around a categorical binary between “permanent” structures, taken to signify Civilized modes of dwelling, and temporary structures, taken to signify Savage modes of dwelling. This binary also positions domestic architecture as a signifier of modes of governance, with permanent structures standing in for a Civilized body politic, defined over-against a Savage, wandering, stateless horde. By imposing the position of the stateless, wandering Savage onto sovereign Indigenous nations, colonizers have been able to justify their violations of Indigenous sovereignty in the name of Civilization, including violent attacks such as that likely masterminded by Amherst as well as legal mechanisms codified in the 1820s US Supreme Court’s Marshall Doctrine, which would underwrite the US’s intensifying land grabs and atrocities of the 19th century. By signifying Civilized governance, the permanent house disavows this violent history, even while it discursively consolidates (dis)possessive claims that are founded on and require ongoing violence. Then, in excavating colonial-imperial relations in the banal fabric of suburbia, the pieces converses with the Suburban Gothic trope of US (settler) pop culture, but complicates this trope by locating the roots of its haunting in the violence of ongoing colonization, and by pointing towards the dismantling of these roots.