This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
—Woody GuthrieThe refrain of Woody Guthrie's iconic “This Land is Your Land” has always haunted me. I often hear the “for you and me” repeated as it circles my consciousness like a needle trapped in a record groove, echoing “for you and me, for you and me, for you and me, for you and me” and then slowing, distorting into “for you … ? And me … ?” The repetition seems to signal some malfunction and maybe, as in cinema, a foreboding of a terrifying event, an untimely end, or danger on the horizon. I'm sure I often sang it as a child, and I know I sang it as a labor organizer in graduate school. I could never summon the requisite enthusiasm for singing that song on stolen land as a descendant of both stolen peoples and settlers. Perhaps what I've learned most concretely from being a scholar of conceptions of land and environment, with special attention to African-diasporic and Indigenous environmental heritages, is that this land indeed was and is made. I have learned that the “you and me” is decidedly not me and that the land is often made as “yours,” where you are the state or the settler or the white possessive (Moreton-Robinson Reference Moreton-Robinson2015). I have learned that often the Black women yous and mes, the Indigenous, brown women yous and mes, are frequently made the land itself through our continuous and seemingly unending murders and disappearances. We become land in quite a literal way that never honors us as land while we're living or, in fact, never honors our lives, bodies, deaths, and lands at all. We are often either murdered or missing or on the way to being murdered or missing both literally and figuratively. The conjunction of “you” and “me” in “This Land is Your Land” has always haunted me. It is simultaneously a signifier, an epithet, a threat, a future.
In this article, I focus on the idea of land as made and on who or what land is for, within and among the dominant structures of settler colonialism. In the settler-colonial context of North America, I often wonder who the “you and me” or “we” are and what it means to presume identification with that you, me, or we. In particular, this article centers the idea of the madeness of land, of the discursivity of land, by focusing on who/what this land is made for within the settler-colonial context of North America and what that means for those who are unmade or who become the land—the ground for settler colonialism in a quite literal sense. I do this by attending to the oft-obscured, overwhelming extent of femicide, particularly, for the purposes of this article, the murders and disappearances of Black and Brown women. My main theoretical problem is to try to understand why— although both the murders and disappearances of Black and Brown women are generally obscured and not given the attention and urgency a social/political horror like this deserves and merits—the murder and disappearances of Black and Brown women are not theorized in a way that connects them to the project of settler colonialism in North America, steeped in land dispossession, gendered spatial and corporeal violence, and, importantly, antiblackness. In this way, I attempt to overcome the ways in which blackness and slavery are often read out of the settler-colonial context, or seen as outside of it, and more generally, to overcome the pervasive exclusions of gender analyses, especially Black and Brown women's lives, deaths, and corporealities, from discussions of settler colonialism, land, and environment (Wynter Reference Wynter2003; McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006; Goeman Reference Goeman2013; paperson Reference paperson2017).
I wrote this article situated in my own experiences as a multiethnic Black woman in the settler colony of the US who is familiar with and proximal to experiences of some of the violence(s) articulated in this piece within my personal history and community; I am less familiar and more distant from others. Importantly, I am sitting in both the woundedness and possibility of my intergenerational, historical, and continuous present traumas, histories, and realities that are punctuated, underlined, and permeated with both disappearances and sexual violences. What (re)appearingFootnote 1 the corporeality, life, and death of Black and Indigenous women in this land means is various and multiple, but it requires, for me, a reckoning with my own ancestors and loved ones missing from my personal intergenerational and historical archives. In this way, I must and do think with Kristie Dotson when she centers the connection of Black womanhood and existence to our ancestors (both ordinary and extraordinary) who survive with us always as we persist. In this way, I too must recognize the ways in which, as Dotson puts it, “my memory is longer than my lifespan” (Dotson Reference Dotson2018, 192). Consequently, the lineage of violence and survival of Black and Indigenous women as centered and articulated by their/our own experiences is an important theoretical genealogy of knowledge referenced in this work.
Reading Lands, Reading Bodies
In “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers states: “Let's face it, I'm a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. … My country needs me and if I were not here, I would have to be invented” (Spillers Reference Spillers1987, 65). Spillers discusses how the body/flesh distinction in the construction of Black corporeality and captivity attempts to obliterate gender, enabling these flesh/bodies to function as the territory for domination, but also how the brutalization of flesh and the crystallization of this violence onto marked bodies/entities represents a cultural text. The construction of ungendered flesh for brutalization and violence, for Spillers, constitutes a symbology of meaning that translates to particular dominative relationships in the New World. Through expanding the lens of settler colonialism to the construction of Blackness on the shores of western Africa before the Middle Passage, she also articulates the criticality of Black female corporeality to the geography of the New World, situating Blackness and enslavement as an integral and necessary aspect of settler-colonial projects. By focusing on the “flesh and blood” entity, the theorization of brutality, usually relegated to the gendered experiences and histories of Black male bodies, Spillers captures the brutal physical violence as it applies to Black female bodies as well. “This materialized scene of unprotected female flesh—of female flesh ‘ungendered’—offers a praxis and a theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations” (68). Spillers offers us insight and methodology to develop a new grammar to read the cultural texts Black female corporeality embodies, a way of naming this markedness in important ways. The idea of being marked and unnamed is important, especially within the settler-colonial context. What we are talking about are the classificatory systems of order created at least since the Enlightenment that meant to arrange and classify the natural world into discrete units and categories, which coincided with European territorial expansion and domination of the New World/new lands and peoples found there (Alcoff Reference Alcoff2005; Wynter Reference Wynter, Gordon and Gordon2005). Scholars of race agree that this is largely when the foundations of a biological construction of race, as we know it, began to come into circulation and parlance (Hannaford Reference Hannaford1996; Bernasconi and Lott Reference Bernasconi and Lott2000; Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson2015). So the literal mapping of lands was occurring at the same time that human bodies were also being mapped and classified in visible ways as both raced and gendered. However, these processes were naturalized in such a way that the same physical realities loaded with signification in racialized and gendered classificatory systems became what marked you as a highly visibilized target and also what made your existence devalued and invisibilized, made your life matter less or not matter, as it were.
The Black women missing from the archives that Spillers and other Black feminist theorists draw our attention to are historical and contemporary, both literal and figurative in the ongoing processes of settler-colonial violence in North America. The need to center or (re)appear Black and Brown female corporeality has not diminished, as can be witnessed through the increasing attention and discourse surrounding the murder and disappearance of Black and Indigenous women in North America (Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017; Anderson, Campbell, and Belcourt Reference Anderson, Campbell and Belcourt2018). These systematic markings and targetings highlight the ways in which the intersections of conquest and colonialism play out on the bodies of women of color (Goeman Reference Goeman2013; Million Reference Million2014; Deer Reference Deer2015b; Crenshaw and Ritchie Reference Crenshaw and Ritchie2015; Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017). Campaigns such as #SayHerName and Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) draw our attention to the pervasive and particular precarity Black and Brown women face in North America (Crenshaw and Ritchie Reference Crenshaw and Ritchie2015; Khaleeli Reference Khaleeli2016; Wakeford Reference Wakeford2016; Talaga Reference Talaga2017; Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017; Anderson, Campbell, and Belcourt Reference Anderson, Campbell and Belcourt2018). Investigations into these quite pointed systems of colonial violence are articulated from sites of both Black feminism(s) and Indigenous feminism(s), representing who and what we can “perceive” or perhaps “read” through centering the experiences as well as the corporeality of Black/Brown women, largely obscured by dominant discourse and settler-colonial state institutions.
The illegibility and inattention to the serious issues of femicide and disappearing of Black and Indigenous women in North America are influenced by a variety of factors, and surface in various manners. For example, the dearth of readily available and detailed statistical data on these issues is influenced by lack of prioritization of these realities as well as the pervasive culture of silencing and not believing the testimony and voicing of nondominant Others, such as Black and Indigenous women. It is also influenced by the pervasiveness of violence against Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color perpetrated by the police, an institution notorious for not tracking these realities and protecting itself against such investigations (Crenshaw and Ritchie Reference Crenshaw and Ritchie2015; Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017). In drawing on the campaigns developed by and for Black and Indigenous women as exemplified in #SayHerName and MMIWG, I am centering the testimonies, experiences, and agencies of Black and Indigenous women. I am also purposely refraining from the type of “statistics dump[ing]” that can depersonalize and abstract away from these realities (Deer Reference Deer2015a).Footnote 2 Although the dearth of statistical information is an important reality to keep in mind in the pushing aside of the issues facing Black and Indigenous women in North America, I also want to point out and center the grassroots organizing and research that is ongoing in documenting these realities that is often or especially discounted in academic discussions and knowledge-production (Deer Reference Deer2015a; Gray Reference Gray2018). This can and does contribute not only to the marginalization of the testimonies of those directly experiencing the issues, who have been speaking about these experiences for generations, but also to the cooptation of Black and Indigenous women's experiences only once “high” academic research and statistical analysis is conducted, often by outside “experts” who are removed from the communities affected. This is also a problem in that Black and Indigenous women have to cite Western data in order to have their experiences recognized as both legitimate and legible (Cunneen and Rowe Reference Cunneen and Rowe2014, 58; Deer Reference Deer2015a, 5). I am thinking here also with Andrea Ritchie:
In a tradition of radical honesty, I seek to honor our truths by showing the full range, breadth, and depth of our experiences, without euphemizing or sugarcoating them. At the same time, I strive to avoid reproducing and normalizing violations through what essentially amounts to a parade of Black, Indigenous, and “othered” death and a pornography of abuse. I have not always gotten it right, and I continue to grapple with how to speak these truths in the least harmful and most generative and honoring ways. Where possible, given how little information is available about these cases and the women at their center, I have made every effort to breathe life into women's stories beyond the moment of their violation, using their own words or those of their loved ones. (Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017, 16)
In this way, I both reference and participate in a long tradition of truth-telling of Black feminist and Indigenous feminist theory and praxis that dwells in the horrors of violence experienced by Black and Indigenous women, but also critically honors their resilience, complexity, humanity, and sacred ordinariness. My contribution in this article thus relies on identifying theoretically a gap in settler-colonial studies that elides the experiences and contributions of Black women and Indigenous women.
As a result, I center campaigns and interventions by and for Black and Indigenous women guided and anchored in their own experiences and interpretation of their experiences as calls to action. The interventions of #SayHerName and MMIWG call us to investigate more thoroughly the connectivity and entanglement of conquest and coloniality as an inherently gendered space-producing venture. Thus I focus on how the intersections of the murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women in North America is integrally related to the continuance and adaptability of settler-colonial systems that both require this violence as well as the erasure/denial of this violence. I work closely with brilliant discourse growing out of Black studies/Black feminist studies and Indigenous studies/Indigenous feminisms to track the co-constitutive nature of projects of settler colonialism that require and destroy, mark and unname, brutalize and ungender Black/Brown female bodies.
I will begin by exploring certain contributions from the work of Black and Indigenous feminisms to situate a critique of Euro-descendant settler-colonial discourses. These critiques identify the structuring of space in settler-colonial discourses as bounded and argue that this contributes to undertheorizing the specificity of varied experiences of women of color in settler-colonial landscapes, which are necessary for the functioning/continuance of settler colonialism. I want to add here that I am identifying settler-colonial discourses in a paradigmatic way, in the sense of qualifying what is commonly referred to as “discourse” or “mainstream academic thought” as having particular values and content that support settler colonialism. In this way, much of “mainstream academic philosophy” operates with settler-colonial elements that are rarely named as such or theorized overtly (Salami Reference Salami2015; Van Norden Reference Van Norden2017; UCL n.d.). This issue can be approached from a variety of angles, some of which include: the hegemonic structuring of communities of knowers, dominant Western epistemologies, areas deemed worthy of research, “traditional” canons, curriculum, racialized and gendered practices of citation, refusal to contextualize higher education and academic production as built on historical/continuous practices of land dispossession and slavery, among others (Bang and Medin Reference Bang and Medin2010; Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2012; Calderon Reference Calderon2014; Medin and Bang Reference Medin and Bang2014; de Oliveira Andreotti et al. Reference de Oliveira Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew and Hunt2015; paperson Reference paperson2017; Gaudry and Lorenz Reference Gaudry and Lorenz2018; Ray Reference Ray2018). Practices such as these constitute the existence and continuance of settler-colonial commitments that are often obscured in the pronouncement of mainstream academic discourse as universal, general, and objective.
The analysis within the article is organized in two veins: I look at Black feminist and Indigenous feminist critiques (1) from the contributions of Black feminists who attempt to locate Black female corporeality within the settler-colonial landscape and bridge the sites of Native elimination and Black slavery, and (2) from Native feminisms that articulate settler colonialism as a project of bounding space to fix oppressive and unrealistic categories of difference. Finally, I examine how conceptions of both land and bodies as fixed, bounded within settler-colonial discourses, betray assumptions imported from a dominant Western philosophical orientation that often degrades and evades subjective, lived experience. This last point is precisely why we must look to Black/Indigenous feminisms that settler-colonial discourses/settler colonialism attempt to pave over.
(Re)Appearing Blackness: The Unending Praxis of Black Feminisms
Black and Indigenous feminisms have created and contributed to a conversation about the different positionality and situatedness of groups within the settler-colonial context. Although settler-colonial discourses have traditionally focused on the dyad settler–Native (with the concurrent gendered assumptions that come with it), Black feminists, in particular, have been working to decolonize further the purview of settler-colonial discourse by looking at how conquest, slavery, anti-Black racism, and Black female corporeality are integral projects to settlement and the possibility/futurity of settler categories of identity (Spillers Reference Spillers1987; Wynter Reference Wynter, Gordon and Gordon2005; King Reference King2013; Reference King2016; Dotson Reference Dotson2018). Settler-colonial studies, though giving us key theoretical components such as the elimination of the native and settler colonialism as a structure, not an event, still largely privilege the purview and identity of the settler while focusing almost exclusively on the process of settlement (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006). Should the refrain of “This Land is Your Land” be interpreted as “this land was or has been made for settlers”? The movement toward viewing settler colonialism as a structure and not an event is important, but it does not escape a Western/settler-specific conceptualization of space or settlement as ultimately distinct, identifiable, and bounded. The focus of settler colonialism as a structure and not an event has also contributed to theoretical abstractions away from the mundane, everyday, and practical ways in which settler colonialism functions in and on bodies and lands continuously (paperson Reference paperson2017; Talaga Reference Talaga2017). Feminist interventions into settler-colonial discourse, especially those originating in Black and Indigenous feminisms, highlight that many times, settler-colonial discourse still problematically assumes the positionality of settler identity and assumes it as normative (Goeman Reference Goeman2009; Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2012; Simpson Reference Simpson2014; King Reference King2016). This gestures to an ongoing lack of critical attention to how the gendered nature of an open and ongoing system of settler colonialism can complicate these assumptions, which these feminist theorizations take up.
Tiffany King has argued in “In the Clearing: Black Female Bodies, Space and Settler-colonial Landscapes” that although settler-colonial theory has given us an understanding and language to talk about the landedness of settlement as well as the elimination of the native, it often still operates under an assumption or comprehension of the project of settlement as an inherently bounded venture: that the land was/is made in a final, naturalized sense and is not, instead, a continuous project of making or unmaking involving the decisions of actors to continuously choose and support these ongoing systems and constructions of land as such, with lethal consequences, especially for Black and Indigenous women. This colonial understanding of lands, bodies, and space within settler-colonial discourse, with emphasis on the processes at work for the grounding and futurity of settler identities/relations, obscures the simultaneous practices of conquest also carving up landscapes for settlers. This leads, for King, to a lack of adequate theorization of projects of space-making, requiring the creation of Black female bodies for settler-colonial relations that still shape our everyday experiences and navigations of these landscapes (King Reference King2013). This can lead and has led to the theorization of Black female corporeality and Black womanhood as significantly unrelated to the violence/project of settler colonialism in ways that can support the unjustified erasure of Black women from the US landscape, instantiated most acutely in the ongoing murder and disappearance of Black women (Crenshaw and Ritchie Reference Crenshaw and Ritchie2015; Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017). In this way, I am interested in the theorization and corporeality of Black and Brown women's lives as both conditions and interruptions of settler colonialism. The focus on corporeality in this article in particular is a political decision made to draw attention to the ways in which concepts and referents such as “person” or “human” are problematically exclusive of Black women and Indigenous women. Here, I am thinking with Sylvia Wynter as she meticulously traces the construction of Man as sequences of ethno classes reliant on the qualification of Others such as Black peoples and Indigenous peoples as subhuman, outside the realm or genre of Man, of the human (Wynter Reference Wynter2003). Similarly, the term and signifier person is fraught in the history of Western philosophical thought and often, through dominant regimes of power, disqualified racialized and gendered Others from categories of full personhood (Pateman and Mills Reference Pateman and Mills2007). Through engaging with the theorization attempting to decolonize settler-colonial discourse, I am interested in remapping, reimagining, and reperceiving how the settler-colonial landscapes we navigate today (and every day) are made possible by the intersecting power of systems that settler colonialism proper urges us to see as distinct and unrelated (King Reference King2013; Reference King2016).
In “In the Clearing,” King centers and explores the Black female body as an integral site of the space-making project of settler colonialism in the US. She focuses on how dyadic understandings of settlement as settler–Native necessarily uncomplicate the overlapping relations of power/relations to land and bodies of settler-master and the primacy of the creation of Black female bodies for the expansion of territory, as well as the Black female body as a locus of unending property, a thesis explored extensively in Black feminist discourse (Hartman Reference Hartman1997; McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006; Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016). Christina Sharpe refers to this idea of the Black female body as a locus of unending property by examining the continuous afterlives of slavery and indeed Black life in this current moment as living the “afterlife of property,” which is directly related to the centrality of the construction of the Black female body as property and as the continuous productive and reproductive site of more property. Sharpe states:
Living in/the wake of slavery is living “the afterlife of property” and living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother. That inheritance of a non/status is everywhere apparent now in the ongoing criminalization of Black women and children. (Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016, 15)
Here, we get further context for the construction of both marked and unnamed bodies integral to the continuance of settler colonialism, but devalued and violated all the while. We also need to pay attention to the ways in which dominant historical narratives always want to position slavery and settlement in the temporal past and not as living, evolving on the bodies and lands the settler-colonial state enacts violence upon and through.
What Sharpe is referring to here is the exceptional instantiation of matriarchal lines of inheritance in a patriarchal, settler-colonial, slave state whereby the progeny of any enslaved Black woman became property. Slavery as a status of being property or rather nonbeing was passed down from mother to child, making the patriarch's status void for the purposes of accumulating and amassing property in the form of enslaved persons to clear or make the land productive for slave masters/settlers. In this way, Blackness within the settler-colonial slave context was governed by an accumulative logic, whereas Indigenous peoples were and are governed within the settler-colonial context by an eliminative logic for the purposes of vacating/occupying lands for expropriation (Hartman Reference Hartman1997; King Reference King2013; Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016). Although the logics are contradictory, they work in tandem to both expand and cultivate land to produce and reproduce the settler state. Relatedly, women are targeted in each of these logics for their reproductive power to increase property, in the case of Black women, or to attack sovereignty and continuance, in the case of Indigenous women (Goeman Reference Goeman2013; Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017). I should also add here that familial separations are marked and well-worn tactics of settler colonialism from settlement to slavery to the present and that women of color, especially Black and Indigenous women, are highly vulnerable to these horrific realities both historically and currently (Hartman Reference Hartman1997; Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017; Talaga Reference Talaga2017; Anderson, Campbell, and Belcourt Reference Anderson, Campbell and Belcourt2018; Jones Reference Jones2018).
In further explicating how spatial analysis can (re)appear Black female corporeality and Blackness in the settler-colonial context, King states,
A spatial analysis allows us to pay attention to interlocking systems of power as they simultaneously produce bodies and space. Attending to space, particularly cultural landscapes, also creates conceptual space to think about the ways that multiple temporal periods and forms of power coexist as palimpsests. When we confront the challenge of bringing together disappearing Native bodies that are supposed to be eliminated and fungible Black bodies that are supposed to multiply, we encounter divergent analytical lines. … Instead, I track the Black female body as a process that is constituted by and constitutes landscapes. My mapping of the Black female body and settler colonial landscapes is a form of critical geography. (King Reference King2013, 15–16)
The impetus of Western philosophical discourse, and particularly poised starting points of settler-colonial discourse, to construct lands and bodies as distinct, identifiable, ultimately exhaustible objects/properties reifies and bounds space. This could be considered violent in itself, but it also functions as an imposition of a colonial perception, and perhaps legibility, that limits our ability to understand the intersectional powers constantly producing and reproducing these bodies and spaces. It attempts to demarcate the messiness of how these systems of power are inter-imbricated and thus conceal the violence, particularly to Black and Brown women. The land is made and we come to see its madeness not as the outcome of historical or ongoing processes but as the land in itself, as it has always been and as it will always be; we come to see and understand bodies in these ways too (Wynter Reference Wynter2003; Moreton-Robinson Reference Moreton-Robinson2015). These limitations of colonized perception and imagination also affect how we understand or perceive the connections between our everyday navigations of settler-colonial landscapes. This limitation of perception and legibility is directly related to the lack of theorization of the connections between disappearances and murders of Black and Indigenous women as importantly related to and co-constitutive of the possibility of settler identity and futurity. King continues,
What I am interested in is making settler colonial power visible when we think slavery and its repressive and productive (discursive) power is the only force operating at the scene. At the same time, I am also working to reveal that anti-Black racism's productive and repressive power are also in play when the settler is eliminating the Native and clearing the land. Settler colonialism and slavery do not exist in any predictable dialectical relation to one another. Their interplay and coordinates are at times unpredictable. (King Reference King2013, 20–21)
In this way, King privileges a decolonizing of sight/perception, and by extension feeling, in the ways in which we orient ourselves to settler-colonial landscapes. This reorienting and decolonized sight/perception has serious and important implications for what we might see or perceive in terms of the inter-imbricated systems of power/violence that we cannot or do not see with colonized perception. Is the refrain of “This Land is Your Land” catching in your throat yet? The prioritizing and attention to space/space-making practices is integral to Black feminist and Indigenous feminist theorizing that attempts to understand the complicated, lived, and spatially unruly overlap of Black/Brown women's existences and experiences in settler-colonial landscapes.
We can see this contemporarily in the historical and ongoing murder and disappearance of Black women, especially by the state. The #SayHerName campaign directly calls our attention to the unaddressed extralegal murders of Black women and how, even in progressive discussions of police brutality, it is men's names we know and hear, and brutality is largely conceived of in masculinized forms (Crenshaw and Ritchie Reference Crenshaw and Ritchie2015; Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017). This unnaming works side by side with the ever-mounting body count and corporeality that is the target of personal and state violence, revealing a new-fashioned, but well-worn eliminative logic of settler colonialism. The productive power of Black female corporeality and Black women's bodies is still exploited in the settler nation-state as evinced by labor conditions, economic stagnation, environmental injustice, mass incarceration, antiblack sexism, and misogynoir; however, at the same time, Black women are constructed as overly reproductive burdens upon, and schemers within, the state welfare system, as justified targets for lack of regard, violence, and elimination (Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017). #SayHerName is a response to these realities that refuses to acquiesce to settler colonialism's necessity for and attack upon Black women's lives through the silencing, neglect of, and justice ever-deferred for their murders.
Native Feminisms: Unbound(ing) Lands, Bodies, and Subjectivities
I will now move on to addressing Indigenous feminist contributions to this topic. In understanding the power and pervasiveness of spatiality and its role in seeing/experience, Mishuana Goeman explores the ways in which unsettling settler mapping, and hence spatiality, affects the possibility of everyday Native materiality and reality. Goeman illustrates how the geopolitical and spatial mapping of settler colonialism also cognitively maps our varied experiences navigating and even conceptualizing space within settler-colonial landscapes. Settler sight and the settler vantage point are necessarily precluded from the positionality of both Native and Black corporeality, and yet the settler spatial order requires compliance through these bodies through the disciplining and internalization of settler spatial logics.
Spatial segregation and confinement are foundational to colonialism in general, and settler colonialism specifically. From plantations, to slave quarters, to reservations, to residential schools, to Jim Crow, to housing projects, to redlined neighborhoods, ordering space and restricting movement and migration is a disciplinary tactic of power and control (McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006; Goeman Reference Goeman2009; Reference Goeman2013; McKittrick Reference McKittrick2013). In colonial and settler-colonial contexts, it is also highly gendered. Projects of segregation were also and perhaps puzzlingly accompanied by strategies of pervasive assimilation. Even if you lived in a segregated neighborhood, you were still meant to emulate and hold yourself to the standards of white/settler values and patriarchal, heteronormative familial structures. This also ordered and restricted space and movement within and outside of the household, which severely affected Indigenous peoples’ and especially Indigenous women's roles in their sovereignty and governance structures as well as those governance structures’ functions and abilities to protect Indigenous women and girls (Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017; Talaga Reference Talaga2017; Anderson, Campbell, and Belcourt Reference Anderson, Campbell and Belcourt2018; Leonard Reference Leonard, Anderson, Campbell and Belcourt2018). These tactics also visibilized and marked Indigenous women in particularly violent ways, such as the construction of Indigenous women as “inherently violable” (Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017; Leonard Reference Leonard, Anderson, Campbell and Belcourt2018). As Indigenous lands are violated and carved up for settler-state economic productivity, Indigenous women are made particularly vulnerable, as evinced by the unconscionable rates of murder and disappearance of Indigenous women (Amnesty International 2004; RCMP 2014; Anderson, Campbell, and Belcourt Reference Anderson, Campbell and Belcourt2018). An example of this is how Indigenous lands are being appropriated for resource-extraction, accompanied by “man camps” where the male workers are housed on site and the increased incidence of sexual assault, sexual violence, and violence that take place there, especially against Indigenous women and girls (Deer Reference Deer2015b; Knott Reference Knott, Anderson, Campbell and Belcourt2018). MMIWG is a campaign, again, to name and speak out against this endemic violence that is not spoken about or addressed appropriately through dominant settler-colonial discourse (Ritchie Reference Ritchie2017; Anderson, Campbell, and Belcourt Reference Anderson, Campbell and Belcourt2018; Gray Reference Gray2018). Talking back and naming, especially when the talking and naming is coming from those whom settler colonialism wishes to destroy and silence, is a powerful critique of systems of domination as well as an interruption of these systems of domination that are always already understood as complete, unchangeable, natural.
These ways of setting up space, of making lands and bodies the fodder for the functioning of a settler-colonial system, are also internalized by everyone in the system, but are most damaging to those they oppress instead of privilege. These cognitive settler mappings act to obscure the sight of overlapping systems of power and oppression that hide the body count and extinguish Native/Black women's existences/resistances. Cognitive settler mappings importantly work to inscribe settler-colonial landscapes with distinct power pathologies that separate the co-constitutive nature of processes that attempt to eliminate the Native and negate the slave. This can happen quite literally in the lack of theorization of these events as related, but also in everyday dialogue and discourse that describes settler-colonial domination and antiblack racism as fundamentally distinct (King Reference King2013). This distinction is complicated through the centering and privileging of Black/Brown women's everyday experiences of navigating settler-colonial landscapes because this reorientation directly confronts and problematizes the closure that settler colonialism deems possible and that settler-colonial discourse assumes.
Part of this problem involves the settler systems that settler colonialism inscribes into and on top of landscapes to the abjectification of Native/Black systems, lived experiences, and ways of knowing (Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2012; Whyte Reference Whyte and Bannon2016). Settler and settler-colonial discourse's conceptions of lands and bodies as bounded and objective in a fundamental sense make descriptions of the closedness of settler-colonial structures possible, but belie the necessary incompleteness of settler-colonial projects whenever they confront the interstitial resistance of Black and Brown embodied subjectivities. Settler attempts to eliminate or negate Black/Brown corporeality and realms of experience are always incomplete in the sense of being capable of completing literal objecthood. This is perhaps one way of understanding though never justifying the severity and perpetuity of violent physical attacks and murder on/of Black and Brown women. Indigenous/Black feminisms understand and articulate that literal object bodies of land/personhood are impossible because lands and bodies are necessarily excessive of these ascriptions or attempts at ultimate reduction (Million Reference Million2009).
The Western dominant attempt to objectify lands and bodies by vacating them of all relationality, subjectivity, and experience is related to the project of settler-colonial aims of denying the truth of the unobjectifiability of living beings and the unboundedness of settler-colonial relations. What I mean by this is the necessary excessiveness of settler-colonial prescriptions of a singular dominant relationship to land/bodies as mastery, domination, and property-ownership. Centering Black and Indigenous women's experiences and theory opens up the space of understanding various, complicated—even incommensurable—avenues of relationality (various ways of relating) not entailed or contained within dominant settler-colonial (dis)orderings (Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2012). The hyper-violent mechanizations of the state in the femicide of Black/Brown women is an ongoing attempt to deny the truth to which those Black/Brown women's lives attest. And these murders and disappearances function as the literal conditions that make further traction of settler identity/futurity possible, yet still not closed, still not bounded. The truth of this defies colonized perception and opens the space of the connections of violence against Black and Brown women as a further continuance of settler-colonial conquest; those stories, those bodies are part of this land, part of this shared landscape.
In this article, I have offered some initial reasons for understanding, but never making sense of, the murder and disappearance of Black/Brown women in North America as indicative of a refashioned continuance of settler violence for settler futurity. I have shown that the (re)appearing of Black and Brown female corporeality and lived experience centers the gendered and violent practice of space-making that attempts to further inscribe colonial perception/boundaries onto processes that co-constitute settler colonialism. Part of this problem is instantiated through the conceptual assumptions of closed/bounded/genderless space, land, and bodies that situate settler-colonial discourse's understandings of settler colonialism as closed. Through a reorientation of spatial understandings from groups that do not assume the boundendness or completability of space, who are targets of extermination and silencing, we begin to see and theorize the connections of these violent practices ultimately toward their express end: the reproduction and continuance of settler logics, identities, and futurities. Our connection as embodied, gendered, marked targets necessitates a theorization of connectedness and coalition, without reducing or collapsing difference, in understanding this movement to literally erase and negate us. Now more than ever, we must say their names, say our names, exhume the bodies, tell the stories, and honor the lives of those settler colonialism makes its literal space of possibility.
Esme G. Murdock is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs at San Diego State University. She works in the areas of environmental philosophy and environmental ethics and social and political philosophy with particular attention to environmental justice, philosophies of race and gender, and settler colonial theory. Her research explores the intersections of social/political relations and environmental health, integrity, and agency. Specifically, her work troubles the purported stability of dominant, largely euro-descendent, and settler-colonial philosophies through centering conceptions of land and relating to land found within African American, Afro-Diasporic, and Indigenous eco-philosophies. (emurdock@sdsu.edu)
