AGAINST EXTRACTION: INDIGENOUS MODERNISM IN THE TWIN CITIES
Duke University Press, 2024
Against Extraction offers a new theory of the relationship between colonialism and the environment. Using the framework “extraction,” this book shows how U.S. colonial violence is fundamentally environmental and how the reproduction of environmental violence sustains cultural investments in colonialism. Bringing together histories of Federal Indian Law, urban redevelopment, environmental policy, and literary and visual arts modernisms, Against Extraction understands the formations that organize colonial worlds as intrinsically extractive. That is, rather than understanding them as autonomous political or cultural structures, this book argues that colonial formations like the city are epiphenomenal to extraction; that they are nothing other than the violent conditions of their own reproduction. At the same time Against Extraction is also an experiment in how to write a cultural history of a colonial place and the vibrant Indigenous artistic tradition that emerged within and in opposition to it. Set in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Against Extraction offers a literary history of indigenous modernism as tradition that, since the mid-19th century, has imagined ways to deconstruct and exceed the socially and ecologically devastating terms of colonial reconciliation or incorporation. Reading the work of Ojibwe cultural producers George Morrison, William Warren, Louise Erdrich, David Treuer, and Gerald Vizenor, Against Extraction gives shape to a living tradition of Indigenous urban world-making whose social and environmental imagination has never been constrained to the extractive structures of everyday colonial life.