Salvage Minds: Representing and Intervening on Unceded Territories

• In Event: Unsettling STS 2

Abstract

The idiom of salvage continues to loom large in contemporary Indian Country, yet the othering echoes of the well-intentioned urge to “save” have long ceased to be solely a problem of scholarly representation. In this talk, I examine how the technical labor involved in representing change has embedded new concepts of salvage throughout unceded Indigenous territories in British Columbia, Canada. Since the late 20th century, the technocratic management of unceded lands has caused Indigenous and settler communities alike to measure the meaning of many everyday practices through the salvaging of landscapes, relationships, and senses of self. Often consigned to damaged landscapes through historical resettlement, many of the Indigenous governing groups who only recently began gathering technical resources and political clout have immediately faced difficult choices brought on by the cumulative effects of resource extraction and climate change. How would new developments be weighed against documentary practices designed to prove cultural distinctiveness before the law? What, exactly, would be saved, and for whom? How would young people recruited into tribal government jobs be asked to balance emergent professional demands with more intimate forms of obligation? Perhaps most crucially, who among the experts whose appropriations marked an earlier era of salvage could be trusted as future allies? As the prospect of regaining outright title to stolen lands is held aside for platforms of immediate engagement, this talk examines how new relationships between the representational artifacts and interventionist strategies of salvage are taking shape in the marginal spaces of Indigenous technocracy.

Author

• Tom Ozden-Schilling, Johns Hopkins University