Surveys, Surveillance, and Indigenous Spatial Practice

• In Event: Settler Colonialism and Scalable Scholarship: Studying Up on The Technopolitics of Indigenous Displacement and Dispossession - I

Abstract

Between 1798 and 1800, the Holland Land Company’s chief surveyor, Joseph Ellicott, surveyed the company’s purchase of what was then called “Genesee Country” in Western New York to create the company’s first map. The survey is part of a larger settler colonial technopolitical strategy that has reshaped the landscape of Western New York. In this paper, I show how post-Revolutionary War efforts to bringing “order” to the land West of the 1763 Proclamation Line in Western New York was a settler colonial project that naturalized the link between the bodies of settlers and the land by figuring Indian bodies and bodies politic as inferior. Attending to a particular moment and place in US settler colonial history, I show how land agents and politicians constructed legal, scientific, and conceptual tools that built a settler colonial geography of Euroamerican belonging vis-à-vis the surveillance of indigenous land and bodies. This paper also offers a spatial analysis of a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) visual code: the wampum belt of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua. Wampum belts are white and purple beaded belts made to observe important moments or agreements for the Haudenosaunee. I describe how wampum links land, to body, to an indigenous body politic historically and today, and how Haudenosaunee spatial practices continually reanimate cartographies of refusal (Simpson 2014). Engaging the question of incommensurability between wampum and the land survey as technopolitical visual codes, I build a broader analytic of indigenous spatial practice that critically contrasts to the racial hierarchies undergirding Euroamerican spatial politics.

Author

• Meredith A. Palmer, UC Berkeley - Geography