Settler Colonialism, Racialized Socioecological Relations, and the Dispossession of Narragansett Land in Rhode Island

• In Event: 2441 - Environment, Oppressions, and Justice II

Abstract

In recent years, environmental sociologists have returned to questions of race and environment with renewed effort to understand their entanglements using innovative theoretical and methodological tools. One important, and exciting, development is the turn towards decolonial and/or postcolonial approaches within environmental sociology, and the discipline at large. As an iteration of postcolonial environmental sociology, in this paper, I argue for sustained attention to the interworking of racialization and colonialism as key elements structuring socioecological relations in settler colonial America. Excavating the history of relations between settlers, Natives, and the land, in Rhode Island, my aim is to illuminate the origins of racialized socioecological relations, with particular attention to land and its use. Rather than telling a linear history that begins with colonial settlement and works its way forward, my analysis begins in the present and works its way deeper through the layers of this history—deeper into the past. The intention driving this departure from sociohistorical convention is the necessity of foregrounding the ongoing struggles of Native Americans within the racialized settler colonial ordering of nature and environment. Countering American sociology’s long-held tendency to relegate Native life and presence to the past, I begin this analysis by thinking about the reservation as a racialized socioecological formation that demands sociological attention. Moving deeper into the strata of Rhode Island’s colonial history, I then turn to the settlement of the region by English settlers, and the ways in which they came to organize nature in exclusion of Native life and their relations to the rest of nature. Finally, digging even deeper, I turn to Narragansett life before the invasion. By drawing attention to the precolonial, Native mode of life, my intent is to further highlight the racialized organization of nature that was imposed by settlers nearly four-hundred years ago.

Author

• Michael Warren Murphy, University of PIttsburgh