“Earth Violence: Indigeneity and the Anthropocene”. Text of a talk delivered at Landbody: Indigeneity’s Radical Commitments, Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, 6 May 2016. Audra Mitchell1 and Zoe Todd2 Audra Mitchell: At the commencement of the talk, we handed out seven gold-painted railroad spikes, images of which are featured in the ‘Spiked’ photo essay (see selected images below). Since the early 2000s, there has been a scramble amongst scientists to define the boundaries of what is being called the ‘Anthropocene’. The term marks an era in which ‘human’ activity has become a geological force, shaping the Earth through terraforming, climate change, chemical deposits, and the creation of a global extinction crisis, amongst other things. As a result of these activities, Anthropocene scientists believe that this so-called ‘human’ era will leave its own distinctive mark in the strata of the Earth. In the rush to mark and claim this era, hundreds of scientists and some social scientists are racing to find a definitive ‘golden spike’: a place in which to drive a stake, make a claim, to the conversion of the Earth into a human dominion. Most notably, the ‘Anthropocene Working Group’ of the subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy is planning in summer 2016 to announce where in spacetime the spike should be driven. It will choose amongst numerous proposals, including the detonation of the first nuclear weapons; the industrial revolution; and the beginning of large-scale agriculture. In so doing, this group of overwhelmingly white, male scholars3 of the physical sciences, whose meetings are closed to the public aims to make a claim on behalf of ‘humanity’ over the history, future and fate of the planet.                                                                                                                1  CIGI  Chair  in  Global  Governance  and  Ethics/Associate  Professor,  Balsillie  School  of  International  Affairs.  Contact:    amitchell@wlu.ca  2  Lecturer  in  Anthropology,  Carleton  University.  Contact:  zoes.todd@carleton.ca    3  See  Kate  Raworth,  2014.  “Must  the  Anthropocene  be  a  Manthropocene?”  The  Guardian  Opinion.  Online.  Available:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/20/anthropocene-­‐working-­‐group-­‐science-­‐gender-­‐bias.    

Strata  by  Audra  Mitchell.  All  rights  reserved

Critics of the Anthropocene are producing excellent work on the domination of scientific perspectives amongst Anthropocene discourses, on Anthropocentric narratives that magnify human agency and entrench the human/nature divide and the Euro-centrism of claims that ‘humans’ as a species4 are responsible for the phenomena transforming the Earth. However, we want to focus on a dimension that has only begun to be articulated: the role of foundational violence in the Anthropocene, and the distinctively colonial violence enacted through the forces re-shaping the Earth and the discourses arising to describe them

Recently, the geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin5 have made an important contribution to this discussion. They argue that the beginning of the Anthropocene should be placed in 1492, the year when the colonization of what would become the Americas resulted in the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Maslin and Lewis focus on the ecological outcomes of this period of mass violence and expropriation: specifically, the climactic fluctuations caused by this period of large-scale killing and death. Instead, we want to focus on the violence itself: the initiation of patterns of colonial domination that would underpin later geo-traumas6 - including the detonation of nuclear weapons and the slow violence of capital accumulation,

industrialization and extinction. Each of these phenomena, central to the concept of the Anthropocene, are rooted in the ‘moment’ of violence that is colonization. We have brought these golden spikes in order to symbolize the violence – physical, semiotic, and ecological – of the Anthropocene as discourse and as material phenomenon. When you handle the spikes, we ask you to reflect on their materiality and its potential for violence: their weight and shape, their utility as weapons, the intention of penetration with which they were forged into phallic forms, their appropriative nature, as the stakes through which claims to land and ‘resources’ are made. We also urge you to reflect on their links to industrialization and the creation of railroads that contributed to the expropriation of Indigenous lands across North America and the near-extinction of the buffalo. Their material basis also speaks to us, of metals torn from soil and stone to fuel the demand for industrial resources and capital speculation.                                                                                                                4  Malm,  Andreas  and  Alf  Hornborg,  2014.  “The  Geology  of  Mankind?  A  Critique  of  the  Anthropocene  Narrative”  The  Anthropocene  Review,  Vol.  1,  No.  1,  pp.  62-­‐9.      5  Lewis,  Simon  and  Mark  Maslin,  2015.  “Defining  the  Anthropocene”.  Nature,  Vol.  519,  pp.  171-­‐80.    6  See  Robin  Mackay’s  “A  Brief  History  of  Geo-­‐Trauma”.  Online.  Available:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19V6wDujWyQ  

Spiked  by  Audra  Mitchell.  All  rights  reserved.

Death/metal  by  Audra  Mitchell.  All  rights  reserved.

These are just a few of the dimensions of violence that come to mind when we hold and reflect on the golden spike. As we do so, we want to generate new discourses on the violence of the Anthropocene. We will be collecting and showcasing these stories online as part of our new ‘Anthropocene Re-working Group’ initiative. The images shown throughout this talk are my initial contribution this project. Now I would like to hand it over to Zoe for her contribution. Zoe Todd: I want to start by quoting Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, from her poem “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon”:

“later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt? it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere.”7

For me, the relationship between violence and the Anthropocene is very tangible. It is not theoretical nor is it abstract. I see it in the ways that colonialism and concurrent exploitation and extraction of resources from my home territory—Treaty Six Territory in Alberta, Canada—has exacted physical and epistemic violence upon the lands my family comes from. We can’t drink the water directly from lakes and rivers and streams that once teemed with healthy fish and invertebrates. Fish swim in constant outbreaks of blue-green algae across the province. Water tables are shrinking. Habitats are under threat. The woodland caribou are almost gone. My great-grandmother Caroline LaFramboise was interviewed by the Edmonton                                                                                                                7  Shire,  Warsan.  2011.  ‘What  They  Did  Yesterday  Afternoon’.  Quoted  in  The  New  Republic,  Accessed  May  11,  2016  (https://newrepublic.com/minutes/124016/poet-­‐warsan-­‐shire-­‐new-­‐voice-­‐refugee-­‐crisis)    

Subcommittee by Audra Mitchell. All rights reserved.

Journal in 19648, on the occasion of her 61st wedding anniversary to James Todd. In the piece, these two Métis lovebirds are described as:

‘Edmonton residents for 29 years, Mr. and Mrs. James Todd of 9748 - 100 St. recently marked their 61 wedding anniversary. Mrs. Todd, the former Carolyn La Framboise was raised on a ranch in the Leduc district and recalls the last spike being driven into the CPR at Edmonton.’

To me, it is interesting that this is the story that the settler journalist chose to highlight in a celebration of my great-grandparent’s epic love story that spanned multiple communities and multiple erasures/displacements in their time on earth. The Edmonton Journal does not highlight my great-grandmother’s resistance to French Oblates at St. Paul des Métis in the early 20th century, nor indeed does the article mention the appropriation (destruction) of their home by the city of Edmonton in the 1960s in order to build a bridge to carry cars over the Rossdale Flats and the North Saskatchewan river, but rather, what is legible to a settler audience reading about a long-married Métis couple is a moment in time that affirms settler-colonial claims to prairie territories. The infamous railroad spike. With that image of the last spike being driven in at Edmonton when my great-grandmother was a girl I think of the golden spike that the Anthropocene Working Group plans to ‘place’ in space-time in August of this year. Though the ‘golden spike’ is a geological tool, a metaphor, it has heft. In that heft, and the weightiness of the expectations and erasures that it encapsulates, I am drawn back to the visceral and heavy and physical railroad spike—the kind that Audra has brought here today. The railroad spike that brought with it the intense settler-colonial paradigms that sought to eradicate Indigenous legal orders in the prairies I grew up in. I think of the ways that Métis people—and Nehiyawak and Ansihinaabek and other nations on the prairies stood up against the government and its expansion into western territories—I think of the risks Métis peoples (and Nehiyawak and other nations) took during the Metis resistances of 1870 and 1885. I think of how MacDonald sent his troops out on the CPR line. To show his might. I think of how those spikes were driven into the flesh of the earth—to draw from Vanessa Watts’9 work here-- and how these spikes and their railroads brought with them the tenets of settler-colonialism that shape the place I grew up in. I think of how much it hurts, the land back home. I think of how so many Nations back home deal, still, with the incursion of Euro-Western ideologies into space-time through the colonial violation of land and bodies. There is so much more I want to say, but I will stop here so that we can explore the intimate and painful relationships between land, bodies, space and time in the Anthropocene and how we can mark those stories in a paradigm that seeks to collapse them into a singular ‘species’ paradigm, as though some did not wrest worlds from lands in order to turn those                                                                                                                8  This  quote  is  from  a  clipping  that  my  Aunt  has  saved  for  family  to  consult.    9  Watts,  Vanessa.  2013.  Indigenous  Place-­‐Thought  and  Agency  amongst  Humans  and  Non-­‐humans  (First  Woman  and  Sky  Woman  go  on  a  European  Tour!).  DIES:  Decolonization,  Indigeneity,  Education  and  Society  2(1):  20–34  

worlds into resource colonies and slave-economies while others fought so hard to maintain their stories, their philosophies, their laws. So my question to you is; where does it hurt--in the continuum of space and time--for you?  At  this  point,  we  invited  the  audience  to  come  up  to  the  corkboard  map  we  had  brought  with  us  and  to  place  pins  in  the  places  and  times  where  the  ‘world  hurts’  for  them.      

 Images  from  the  cork-­‐board  map  provided  for  participants.      Audra Mitchell: Our presentation today is the inauguration of a project and experiment. We want to ask where the world hurts for those people and multispecies communities who are harmed by the Anthropocene - who have felt the wounds of the spike - but who have not been included in discussions about its definition and meaning.

We want to make a digital archive of stories in multiple forms – writings, recordings, songs, images, dances and more - to multiply understandings of where the world hurts and where it needs to be attended to. These contributions – Zoe’s story and map, and Audra’s spikes – are our initial contributions to the project. Now we would like to invite you to get involved by drawing and leaving stories on the maps to let us know where the world hurts for you. We also invite you to take home one of these spikes, place it somewhere where the world hurts for you, and send us your account of this in any medium, then pass it to someone else to do the same All we ask is that you keep the spikes – and the stories – in circulation and, by doing so, help us to compile an alternative set of stories for confronting the violence of the Anthropocene.