Hanödaga:yas

A world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues: the statue of the general who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge. A world cocksure of itself, crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip. That is the colonial world.

– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth²¹

Two works by Alan Michelson and Shelley Niro, respectively, demonstrate accumulation by waste as exerted in the form of 18^th-century warfare. As this section shows, the works reveal the ways in which war was used by the emerging U.S. settler state to de-develop—lay waste to—Haudenosaunee land and resources and consolidate terrain for colonial extraction and occupation, through which the industries and sacrifice zones of capital growth would be built. The first of these, Michelson’s Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), a 2018 video installation in which symbols of the murderous Sullivan-Clinton campaign of 1779 are projected onto a neoclassical bust of George Washington, reflects on Washington’s role as the architect of genocide against the Six Nations, a role that earned him the nickname, after his great-grandfather, Hanödaga:yas—Town Destroyer. The second, Niro’s ongoing photographic project Battlefields of My Ancestors, interrogates the myriad artifacts of dispossession that have shaped settler colonial spatial perception and memory in New York State ever since.

Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer)

Alan Michelson, 2018, HD video, bonded stone Houdon replica bust, antique surveyor’s tripod, artificial turf; sound: members of Six Nations of the Grand River Territory (courtesy of the artist)

In 1779, Washington ordered a costly military incursion deep into Haudenosaunee territory in what is now northeastern Pennsylvania and a large part of New York State.²² Washington, the commander of the Continental Army, was explicit that the purpose of the campaign was to fully eradicate the “hostile” Native population from highly strategic, resource-rich terrain. As he instructed, “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their [Haudenosaunee] settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.”²³ Consequently, the Sullivan-Clinton campaign, named for two of its generals, burned, pillaged, and murdered over large swaths of Six Nations territory. Over the span of just a few months four expeditions numbering thousands of men destroyed, by conservative estimates, dozens of villages and hundreds of houses throughout the region, and they also set fire to hundreds of acres of Haudenosaunee farmlands and storehouses, which included cornfields, orchards, gardens, and crops as well as supplies, belongings, and provisions.²⁴ Historian Rhiannon Koehler, who has quantified the destruction, estimates that as much as 55.5 percent of the Haudenosaunee population, according to 1776 figures, may have been killed either through direct military violence or as a result of the long-term effects of the scorched earth campaign.²⁵

This “Great Whirlwind,” as Seneca elder Farmer’s Brother called the invasion, set the stage for the subsumption of millions of acres of Haudenosaunee land into U.S. territory.²⁶ Drawing on Marx, Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) recognizes such transfers in terms of primitive accumulation, the violent transformation of non-capitalist spaces and formations into capitalist arrangements through privatized enclosure, dispossession, and the imposition of the wage relation.²⁷ Accordingly, Koehler states that “the [Sullivan-Clinton] expedition’s leaders were primarily concerned with the potential for future U.S. expansion into former Indian territory and the well-being of future settlers in the interior of the country.”²⁸ Meredith Palmer (Tuscarora) observes that “For post-Revolutionary, Euroamerican settlers…the area between the eastern shore of Lake Erie and the Finger Lakes was imagined as the Western frontier of a growing empire,” eyed for agriculture, real estate, and other profitable enterprises.²⁹ In this regard, New York State Governor George Clinton, brother of the military general who laid siege to the region, carved out tracts of land to dispatch as private property: “New York State and the Federal government established land grants in the region to compensate veterans for their service and to encourage settlements,” which segmented, tabulated, and quantified the usurped terrain into commodified units.³⁰ In other words, scorched earth, colonial warfare was employed to de-develop the material basis of large portions of Haudenosaunee society so as to enclose Native land within the engine of capital and reorganize land and space according to the mechanisms and logic of accumulation. Through war came accumulation, plain and simple.

This wasting and subsumption of the land—what Kadri terms “imperialist necrotrophy, the imperialist act of parasitically usurping the imperialised nation”—constituted a deeply existential, indeed apocalyptic, violence.³¹ Not only were farmlands targeted as a basis of reproduction to ensure starvation, to prevent the return of survivors, and to clear territory for occupation, the destruction attacked the source and heart of Haudenosaunee cultural and spiritual identity. Defined as a dynamic system of relations connecting living beings, environmental processes, earthen forms, historical practices, and the spiritual world, land, explains Vanessa Watts (Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe), is understood within Indigenous epistemologies as “alive and thinking.”³² Its material-ecological affordances give rise to human and nonhuman communities as expressions of earthly thought, which dialectically relate back to it in reciprocal interrelation as shapers of environmental processes. As Susan Hill (Mohawk) observes, a wide variety of Haudenosaunee objects, traditions, and practices center on this dynamic notion of land as a life-giving force that must be cared for and stewarded by human beings; the social, cultural, and intellectual structures of the Haudenosaunee world are thus built on, and revolve around, this land-based ethic of co-production and responsibility.³³

Michelson’s Hanödaga:yas recalls the Sullivan-Clinton campaign’s project of laying waste, desublimating the idealized memory of Washington, burner of villages. Mounted on a surveyor’s tripod and set to the sound of percussive rattles and spoken repetition of the name Hanödaga:yas, still and moving images of campaign maps, site markers, historic documents, portraits, and other materials project onto the pearly white likeness of Washington, variously marking, coloring, and effacing (or defacing) his visage. The portrait bust that acts as screen for the sequence of projections is a replica of one by Jean-Antoine Houdon, the famed French sculptor of Enlightenment figures. Nude from the chest up in the manner of Greco-Roman antiquity, Washington shrewdly peers into the distance, evoking a sense of mental acuity and calculating foresight. His hard look no doubt is meant to portray him as the “Hero over History,” the exceptional figure who envisages and conquers the unfolding of time.³⁴ In Michelson’s hands, however, this steely eyed gaze becomes a covetous one: cartographical representations resurface fetishized white marble with the outlines of stolen territory while the surveyor’s tripod supplants the sculptural pedestal as a symbol of land speculation and property value. Rather than a timeless portrait of the Hero, enshrined in neoclassical form, Washington is now contextualized (historicized) amid the bloody circumstances of land theft, colonization, and genocide.

In her work, Shelley Niro demystifies the myth of U.S. providence with photographs tracing the cartography of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign, recalling the brutality that gave rise to the settler state and society. Her ongoing Battlefields of My Ancestors project records sites where colonial violence took place that are now marked by commemorative materials or emblems of industry and development. The photographs document historical markers, including signs, plaques, and monoliths, erected in the 1920s and ’30s for the 150^th anniversary of the American War of Independence “to designate sites that are of historic significance in the colonial, revolutionary or state formative period.”³⁵ As noted by Andrea Lynn Smith and Nëhdöwes (Randy A. John) (Seneca), the markers were seen as important contributions to the sesquicentennial celebrations, for they drew attention to portions of the state previously passed over in such ceremonies.³⁶ They continue to contribute to the state’s identity today as commemorative objects, and local communities and historical societies remain deeply invested in their celebration and memorialization.³⁷

Cayuga Lake

Shelley Niro, 2014, inkjet print (courtesy of the artist)

As such, the markers enact what has been termed, after Gramsci and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Dakota), anti-Indian common sense, the ideology that organizes and reinforces Native displacement. Mediated by cultural myths, tropes, rituals, and practices that solicit the consent of and participation by settlers to see through the forcible removal, incarceration, and replacement of Native peoples from Native space, anti-Indian common sense is the normative orientation or structure of feeling of everyday colonialism that lays claim to occupied territory as owned property belonging to settler society.³⁸ As a case in point, Smith and Nëhdöwes reveal that the Sullivan-Clinton markers were put in place to reify American victory at the very moment when Haudenosaunee leaders were filing legal claims seeking repatriation of six million acres of unceded territory, which included “whole cities such as Buffalo and Syracuse, large industrial centers, power plants, railroads, the Erie Canal.”³⁹ Against Indigenous land claims, which refused the settler assumption of ownership, the markers reinscribe a “visual frontier” in which sites of violence and displacement are memorialized as stepping stones in the evolution of New York State.⁴⁰

Battlefields of My Ancestors thus interrogates this hegemonic sensibility. One photograph, for example, records the presence of a real estate advertisement selling “heritage homes” on stolen land along the Grand River in Ontario—territory granted to the Haudenosaunee by the British in 1784 to relieve the loss of land and the effects of the war, but which the settler state, in time, broke up and appropriated.

Fergus

Shelley Niro, 2015, inkjet print (courtesy of the artist)

Framed against a screen of trees likely staking a property line, the composition mirrors Niro’s images of campaign memorial plaques, recording the billboard at a close distance with documentary facticity. Only now, unlike the other photographs, a wire fence and overgrowth mediate the space between photographer/viewer and the sign, prohibiting one from stepping onto the circumscribed terrain—unless, presumably, buying. When viewed in the wider context of the full photographic series, the composition connects the financial division and commodification of land to historic military atrocities as settler colonialism’s ongoing “heritage.”

In sum, the destruction and enclosure of the Haudenosaunee homeland by colonialism transformed the land in profound ways, violently turning it, as this section has shown, from a dynamic matrix of earthly relations to a reified, tabulated, parceled out gridwork of economic calculations, naturalized as U.S. historical space. This transformation took another shape in the twentieth century, again in connection to imperialist militarism, as the settler regime sought to acquire the power to destroy on a planetary scale, which left behind a trail of contaminated sites and waste storage and management facilities on the very same “frontier” that the Sullivan-Clinton campaign sought to consolidate. In this way, the multi-century process enacts the long arc of accumulation by waste, enframing Native land on the one hand as a lode from which to withdraw resources and appropriate value (energy, raw materials, labor power, real estate) and on the other as a sink into which to dispatch refuse.⁴¹ We now turn to that sink.

Town Destroyer, Again

The negative dialectic, or as things before us go from bad to worse, will be about the production of waste, foremost wasted lives, and the sale of waste for profits…

– Ali Kadri⁴²

The “Niagara frontier,” which the Sullivan-Clinton campaign opened up, became linked to another Town Destroyer in the second half of the twentieth century—the atomic bomb. Built on Seneca land, the chemical sector constituted the dominant industry in Niagara Falls during the majority of the twentieth century. Its heavily concentrated network of manufacturers including Carborundum, DuPont, Hooker, Olin, and the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, among others, made the area “one of the most active industrial centers for chemical production and processing during World War II,”⁴³ acting as a main supplier of explosives, defoliants, disinfectants, rubber materials, raw chemicals, and other military-industrial products during the Second World War, the Korean War (which leveled a dozen cities by carpet bombing),⁴⁴ and the early period of the Cold War.⁴⁵

Significantly, these operations included extensive industry participation in the Manhattan Project. Various companies operated secretive facilities alongside U.S. Army personnel processing uranium for the Manhattan Engineering District (the military unit overseeing the project), manufacturing chemical components, or receiving and handling the radioactive liquids, sludges, and contaminants that resulted from the nuclear project.⁴⁶ Brutally mined, the uranium ore that was delivered to and refined at facilities in Niagara County and Erie County was dug out of the Belgian Congo by the African Metals Corporation, a subsidiary of Union Minière du Haut-Katanga—the imperialist enterprise responsible for devouring the “manifold riches of the Congo,” as Kwame Nkrumah put it.⁴⁷ Taken from Central Africa and processed on Haudenosaunee land, large quantities of radioactive residues and carcinogenic chemicals ended up being released into the natural and built environment, causing widespread pollution that remains to this day. As Jolene Rickard recounts, “The chemical industry landed in Niagara Falls, New York during the 1940s and pumped the worst poisons from the 20th Century into the Niagara River which pours into Lake Ontario. Love Canal, Bloody Run and Modern Landfill surround the Tuscarora boundaries. The tailings from the Manhattan Project were used as fill for the road where I grew up.”⁴⁸

This toxic legacy is captured in an extensive series of drawings by Joan Linder, which mainly takes three forms, collectively titled Operation Sunshine. One is a collection of pen and ink portrayals of waste spaces completed en plein air on accordion-style Moleskine notepads: sprawling, Ruscha-esque horizontal fold-outs, meticulously rendered. Named “toxic landscapes,” these document storage and management facilities as well as the transportation channels through which hazardous materials are nationally circulated. The second form is expansive, one-to-one scale representations of parcels of earth and asphalt at contaminated and everyday locations, such as highly detailed still lifes of weeds and grasses on toxified ground or flowing, tapestry-length charcoal rubbings of irradiated pavement. Lastly, the third form is a series of hand-drawn facsimiles of printed matter ranging from technical and investigative reports to newspaper articles and classified and redacted documents detailing the toxic spaces, practices, and effects of military-industrial operations in Niagara County and beyond (the “toxic archives”). It is hard to overstate the breadth of this third group. By hand, Linder has compiled a veritable library of manual copies of the even vaster paper trail of documentation that fans across newspaper records, historical societies, university archives, the internet, and other sites of knowledge keeping.

In its entirety, this body of work critically uncovers an expansive chemical and radioactive geography tied to military-industrial activity. The first six notebooks, for example, record the barbed wire, chain-link fence-line enclosing the 102^nd Street Landfill on the heavily industrialized Buffalo Avenue in Niagara Falls, the southern reach of the infamous Love Canal dump site.

Hooker 102nd Street

Joan Linder, 2013–2016, detail, ink on six Moleskine notebooks (photograph by author)

Love Canal, a working class hamlet that became the nation’s first Superfund intervention, is undoubtedly the most notorious of contamination sites in the area. The roughly one-mile long defunct canal fragment on which the neighborhood was built was originally slated to drive through the nearby Tuscarora Reservation to power a manufacturing capital—once again expropriating land for capitalist industry—but financial downturn caused the plans to collapse, and only a short, inactive stretch was ever dredged. From 1942 to 1953, Hooker Chemical and the U.S. Army dispatched enormous quantities of drummed chemical wastes into the canal, which later contaminated the neighborhood built there during postwar suburban development.⁴⁹ Hundreds of families were evacuated during the crisis and houses and apartment buildings were bulldozed; the dump site has been permanently quarantined behind a metal fence ever since.

In the wake of this toxic town destruction, G. Peter Jemison, a Seneca artist, created a graphical expression of chemical damage to the web of life that resonates with Linder’s later practice.

Toxsic Crow

G. Peter Jemison, 1983, mixed media on handmade paper (courtesy of the artist)

Toxsic Crow (1983), a pastel portrait on the artist’s signature handmade paper, situates a black crow against a paroxysm of scrawl marks—a chaotic ground that is unlike the composed use of form and color and controlled hatching that characterizes many of his other drawings and paintings. Of this, Jemison has stated, “Driving to the Tuscarora Reservation one time I saw a crow in an enormous landfill said to contain the toxic fill from Love Canal and other sites all contaminated. Crows can’t read the warning signs on the fence surrounding the landfill.”⁵⁰ Accordingly, the artist’s actionist gesture entangles the crow within a violent Twombly-like matrix evoking environmental disorder, articulating one way in which the effects and byproducts of militarism impact other-than-human relatives across Haudenosaunee territory and beyond.

Similarly, the notebooks by Linder attend to the contradiction of nature and waste at the site. Over 40 years since contamination, Love Canal is today a maze of green space and overgrowth.

The evacuation zone at Love Canal where the neighborhood was razed is today the site of scenic overgrowth.

Photograph by author, June 2023

The fenced-off rectilinear dump site and its southern cone both rise into grassy mounds not unlike the postminimalist earthworks of the land art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. But while these constructions—which contain tens of thousands of tons of subterranean chemicals—are meticulously managed and monitored by Occidental Petroleum, Olin Chemical, and the Environmental Protection Agency, the surrounding evacuation zone where homes once stood is an unkempt, rewilded ramble of winding, deteriorated streets, scenic woods, and sprawling underbrush—much of which encloses old, empty driveways, roads to nowhere. The wooded overgrowth harbors deer, fox, coyote, birds, and other fauna, and the site is remarkably still used as a place to illegally dump waste; plastic trash bags and detritus litter the empty streets.⁵¹ Less a “toxic sublime” than a toxic picturesque, then, Linder’s factualist recordings of the meadowy containment mound and the lush wildflowers and plant life enshrouding its barbed wire perimeter soberly document the simultaneously severe, administrative, and idyllic qualities of the waste space, its paradoxical nature.⁵²

Other drawings, namely the archival copies, expand on this exploration of contradictions. Most critically, the copies bring to light a negative dialectic of wasting processes that are shot through social, economic, and spatial forms—messy webs of toxic relations. These drawings trace the dense network of military-industrial sites contaminated with or storing carcinogenic and radioactive materials, including hand-drawn copies of detailed reports of military involvement at Love Canal, copies of radiological surveys of Niagara Falls, and copies of once classified reports on human radiation experiments, among many others. In particular, several images reproduce information on the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW), which was a top-secret munitions plant turned radioactive waste storage facility located on the site of “Model City,” the unrealized manufacturing capital that the canal system was meant to power. Starting during World War II, LOOW constituted a major source of contamination for decades. Reckless and improper storage, inadequate facilities, stunning negligence, and willful acts of pollution, which included directly dumping radioactive substances into creeks and rivers, led to the release of countless quantities of contaminants into waterways, public water supplies, and into the built environment.⁵³ Eventually, the 1,500 acre facility was remediated and a portion was converted into the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS), where 300,000 cubic yards of nuclear bomb-related waste as well as contaminated soils, debris, and equipment (e.g., an irradiated bulldozer) are interred beneath a grassy clay cap.⁵⁴

View of the Niagara Falls Storage Site (the green field) as seen from the top of Modern Landfill.

Joan Linder, 2015 (courtesy of the artist)

Other acreage was carved into plots and sold to private companies, two of which, Waste Management and Modern Landfill, use the allotments, respectively, for hazardous waste storage and garbage landfilling. Still a militarized space, the adjacent plot to the north, screened from the road by a dense perimeter of trees and foliage, is site to an Army National Guard training area, where Army soldiers are trained in combat engineering, physical fitness, tactical exercises, and weapons familiarization.

As recorded by Linder, the garbage landfill generates methane gas which Modern previously used to warm hot houses across the street (H2Gro) growing millions of tomatoes for sale to grocery stores as edible produce.⁵⁵ Crucially, the reproductions locate the waste composition of the commodity as rooted in war, as constitutive of its very being. In Kadri’s assessment, imperialist militarism, the purest form of waste, tears open, by gun and bomb, new spheres of accumulation, new flows of capital, in which human beings are pressed into wasteful production, cutting life short, spreading pollution, and destroying nature; this expropriative process channels superprofits to the capitalist class and apportions a share to a strata of workers inside imperialist nations in the form of abundant, consumable goods, to be enjoyed for pleasure, nourishment, or otherwise, which resultingly end up in waste repositories not unlike this one.⁵⁶ Hence, the commodity is, in this schema, a “waste-laced” bundle of extractive and toxic relations: “Any coke can is part soda and part insecticide, part slave-like labour, and part war.”⁵⁷ To that point, Linder, in a suite of archival copies illustrating the high concentration of hazardous waste sites in Niagara County and a stretch of contaminated soils within the vicinity of LOOW in particular, identifies the area in which the hot house is embedded as a historical nexus of military-industrial, waste-based, and radioactive processes.

Modern: History, Green Innovation, Dedicated Service

Joan Linder, 2015, ink on paper (courtesy of the artist)

Family Owned and Operated

Joan Linder, 2015, ink on paper (courtesy of the artist)

In such light, the agricultural produce is recontextualized as a toxic bundle objectified in (or mystified by) the body of an “organic” tomato whose growth ultimately ties back to the settler colonial and nuclear ambitions of U.S. imperialism.

This bundle or web of toxic relations is still further exemplified in the material ligaments that stitch together the local urban environment. As the recollection by Rickard cited above indicates, the high quantity of radioactive materials in Niagara County provided inputs for paving roads, driveways, and parking lots, encasing elevated levels of radioactivity in everyday spaces of mobility, domesticity, leisure, and consumption. In fact, one article copied by Linder explains that “The U.S. Department of Energy and New York State Department of Health identified 100 hotspots in Niagara County and Grand Island almost four decades ago [in 1979]. The federal government cleaned up about a third of the properties after determining the radioactive waste was linked to [nuclear] weapons development through the Manhattan Project” but left the remainder to languish.⁵⁸ The full extent of radioactive sites in the region, it continues, is unknown but “present significantly throughout Niagara County from the Falls stretching to Grand Island and Lewiston.”⁵⁹ One such site, the parking lot of the Rapids Bowling Center, about a mile north of Love Canal as the crow flies, is reported to be one of the most contaminated properties around, known to have elevated levels of gamma radiation in the bedding beneath the asphalt. In nearby lots, Linder has physically indexed fragments of radioactive ground onto elongated sheets of paper, using charcoal rubbing to transcribe the textured surface of contaminated asphalt into pictorial form. Like the critical representation of the hot house tomato, which exposes the negative dialectic of its composition, the rubbings register the interpenetration of the toxic relation into the physical fabric of the spaces of colonial-capitalism, as an excretion of military-industrial power.

ORNL-DWG 86–1617: Map of Pletcher Road

Joan Linder, 2015, ink on paper (photograph by author)

From Militarization to Decolonization

We recognize that the fight is a long one, and that we cannot hope to win it alone. To win, to secure the future, we must join hands with likeminded people and create a strength through unity. We commemorate two hundred years of injustice and the destruction of the world with these words.

– Six Nations Council, Haudenosaunee Statement to the World

Let us return now to the eighteenth century in order, paradoxically, to imagine the future. As the preceding sections have shown, the forces of military-industrial chemistry and nuclear militarism have created waste spaces that necessitate liberatory paths beyond settler capitalism. In this regard, two works in particular stand out: they envision the material horizon of decolonization as the repatriation of stolen land and resources to, and the continuation of traditional lifeways by, the Six Nations as sovereign entities, free from the colonial yoke to self-govern and self-represent according to Indigenous thought and will on Native land and in Native terms.⁶⁰ According to Rickard, who has written extensively about sovereignty, “the legal-political assertion of sovereignty in the twentieth century has always coexisted with a complex expressive imaginary of visual sovereignty” that sustains tribal customs and traditions as resistant forms.⁶¹ Haudenosaunee intellectual, linguistic, and cultural practices reaffirm the Six Nations’ existence and independence against settler attempts to terminate Native society and totalize colonial-capitalist rule. For that reason, the expanded concept of sovereignty, which, as Rickard notes, exceeds narrow Western formulations, “has become a unifying political strategy among the Haudenosaunee that has been instrumental in our ongoing struggles to maintain our communities, land, and traditions.”⁶²

Before continuing, it is worth noting that Rickard’s framework strongly resonates with anti-colonial Marxist theories of cultural resistance and national liberation. Amilcar Cabral—speaking, in fact, on Onondaga (the firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee) land at Syracuse University in 1970—situates culture, broadly conceived, as an important locus of the struggle for liberation, for the traditions, values, and practices of the colonized nation embody alternatives to the colonial power.⁶³ In his account, not unlike Rickard’s, cultural resistance goes hand in hand with national liberation as the movement by the people to regain sovereign control of the productive forces (land, resources, capital) because it enacts a space to shape and express the framework of liberation: “it is generally within the cultural factor,” in other words, “that we find the germ of challenge which leads to the structuring and development of the liberation movement.”⁶⁴ In this sense, while Rickard’s writings are already located within a rich discourse on sovereignty by Haudenosaunee and Native North American thinkers, the additional resonance with Cabral puts such thinking in tune with a global chorus of anti-colonial theory and strategy, forged in resistance to imperialism on multiple continents. The following two works by Michelson and Rickard give artistic form to these ideas.

First, Alan Michelson’s No York, a modified classroom pull-down map of New York State, reverses the colonialist cartographical erasure of Haudenosaunee society.

No York

Alan Michelson, 1997, acrylic on linen map (courtesy of the artist)

In the years after American independence from British rule, vast swaths of Six Nations homeland were divided into geometric units and sold as private property to white settlers who imported African slave labor to develop the terrain according to capitalist agricultural metrics and a white supremacist agrarian imaginary.⁶⁵ The Ellicott map of West New York (ca. 1800), the first comprehensive settler land survey of the region, visually segments over three million acres of territory into a rigidly defined rectilinear table of land tracts and township lines.⁶⁶ As Palmer notes, “There are no Haudenosaunee place-names depicted on the map or written into the attending field notes. The only trace of Native people existing in this abstracted representation of space is the demarcation of their reserved lands and an ‘Indian path.’”⁶⁷ This “compartmentalized world,” as Fanon calls the colonial division of space, comprises, Palmer continues, a carceral geography: one that promises to segregate and secure the settler capitalist order against the now spatially contained Native adversary.⁶⁸

No York by Michelson, however, recenters Haudenosaunee society, asserting sovereignty. Originally a topographical map color-coding elevation and population levels in green, yellow, orange, and red, the pull-down has been lightly overpainted in matching colors so that only Native words and names remain. This modification does not mark a fictional return to a precolonial past, however, but rather anticipates decolonial futures. The lightness of the artist’s touch has left traces of colonial appellations and political boundaries as faint remainders on the surface of the image. One can make out the word CORTLAND, for instance, inside the rectangle of Cortland County, but the county name and borders are obscured, recoded as mere vestiges of settler cartography that are fading away. The modified map thus visualizes settler colonialism’s compartmentalized world only in spectral form, providing viewers with a painterly manifestation of what Fanon might refer to as a “dying” colonialism: the negation and removal of the “continuous rooting in time” of colonial oppression.⁶⁹

As such, materialized on a classroom pull-down map used to assist grade or high school curricula, the work functions as a teaching tool, a discursive site, able to aid and abet revolutionary decolonial consciousness over and against settler enculturation. That is, unlike conventional painting, which situates the viewer in solitary contemplation of the aesthetic object, the pedagogical mechanism mediates sociality, a dialogic interaction between multiple people, based on learning. Only now, the learning objective is not to represent settler geography as naturalized space but to collectively imagine the dissolution of its structures and boundaries in terms of Native restoration and land rematriation. The dialogic audience thus engages the modified map to glimpse a decolonial future born of anti-colonial history and ongoing struggle.⁷⁰

Second, Jolene Rickard’s Cracked Shell (1994) centers Indigenous horticulture as a restorative tradition opposed to environmental ruination. The name Cracked Shell alludes to the Haudenosaunee creation story of Sky Woman: the celestial being who fell from the heavens and landed on the back of a great turtle, giving rise to the earth. Circular in shape, like the turtle’s shell, the rounded installation suspends eight double-sided photographs between a ceiling-hung, ten-foot-wide hoop and sixteen stone anchors on the floor, tied with ropes of jute.

Cracked Shell

Jolene Rickard, 1994, installation with silver gelatin prints (courtesy of the artist)

The interior photographs lining the inside of the circle portray Haudenosaunee corn harvesting and storage rituals, ways of tending earth: men and women are seen braiding ears of corn into long chains, to be hung and dried for seed, which provide future generations of corn.

Cracked Shell

Jolene Rickard, 1994, detail, silver gelatin print (courtesy of the artist)

The exterior images, by contrast, depict fragmented cultural signifiers inside torrential waters, as a symbol of the destructive and unstable form of life wrought by colonial-capitalism, imposed on Turtle Island.

In the creation story, a flock of birds catch and carry Sky Woman down and place her on a bed of mud provided by water animals (beaver, otter, muskrat), which grows into verdant, earthly life. The “cracking” of the shell thus connotes a double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to the grooves dividing the native snapping turtle’s carapace (the creation story’s referent) into thirteen segments, on which the thirteen moons of Haudenosaunee agriculture are modeled; this ties, just like the rocks strung with jute, the cosmos to the earth as a dynamic, interrelated system of life relations.⁷¹ On the other hand, the “cracked” shell suggests Capitalocenic violence, socioecological damage that impacts and ruptures the animal-earth’s protective covering: cracks as scars.⁷² Raised, as noted above, on the Tuscarora Reservation near where radioactive bedding was used to pave roads, Rickard relates the installation to “the scars on the land that ooze toxins” as residue of imperialism: forever chemicals, radioactive contaminants, and myriad other industrial toxicants.⁷³

In a related work, Sweka and PCBs, shown alongside Cracked Shell at Rickard’s exhibition of the same name in 1994, a poisoned fish carcass visually engulfs the transparent, double exposure of a lone human figure, framing the figure against the marine animal as ground and merging their bodies into one form.

Sweka and PCBs

Jolene Rickard, 1986, double exposure, Ektacolor print (courtesy of the artist)

The visualization expresses the Six Nations Council’s statement that “The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBs in the watersheds of the Great Lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the waters are virtually nowhere safe for any living creature.”⁷⁴ Killed by industrial pollution, the inverted, outsized scale of the carcass, its incorporation of the human figure, thereby communicates the disastrous effects of unchecked contamination on the web of life and the interdependencies of its food networks. The poisoning of the water and water animals poisons the people that depend on this system.

Against extractive capitalism and accumulation by waste, then, Cracked Shell situates Haudenosaunee social relations and horticultural traditions as liberatory, caretaking practices that survive in the “cracks” of colonial wasting.⁷⁵ In the words of the Red Nation, “In places where Native ancestral homelands have been heavily polluted or diminished by resource extraction or militarization, the use of contemporary agricultural and horticultural practices may need to be taken up alongside traditional knowledge.”⁷⁶ Revered by Haudenosaunee communities as the eldest of the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash),⁷⁷ the Six Nations have tended corn for well over a thousand years as a staple of Haudenosaunee sustenance, culture, and creation narratives.⁷⁸ Sustainably grown and harvested using intercropping techniques, corn embodies Haudenosaunee teachings about symbiotic relationships, mutual support, and community responsibility—values that are antithetical to the bourgeois individualism of capitalist society and private property.⁷⁹ The women-led husking and braiding ceremonies, of the type pictured by Rickard, collectively transmit land-based moral and ecological lessons across generations, creating a space of decolonial education and intellectual resistance to the settler colonial suppression of traditional Indigenous lifeways.⁸⁰ For these reasons, as Rickard explains, corn is “a potent symbol of both resurgence, sovereignty and survivance in the Tuscarora Community and traditional knowledge as well as a political marker.”⁸¹

No York and Cracked Shell, then, imagine the dissolution and transformation of colonial-capitalism’s compartmentalized, wasted geography. They envision the restoration of Indigenous lifeways throughout the Six Nations and Turtle Island in which restorative practices of care-based land tenure and social ecology are nurtured and developed across generations. As opposed to the militarization, segmentation, and wasting of land, the earth as a living, breathing system, as “alive and thinking,” giving rise to dialectical interrelations, is prioritized, tending to the wellbeing of soil, air, water, and other-than-human beings. In this frame, the way forward is clear as day. As the Red Nation writes, “U.S. imperialism—the greatest threat to the future of the planet—will never end if land remains in the hands of settler capitalists. The collective future of us all depends upon the ability of Indigenous caretakers to work with the land, restore its health, and reestablish balance in our relations.”⁸²

Afterword

Using the concept of accumulation by waste as a theoretical hinge, this article has traced connections between two seemingly disparate acts of imperialist war, the Sullivan-Clinton campaign of 1779 and the Manhattan Project of the 1940s. It was drafted prior to the launch of Al-Aqsa Flood by Palestinian resistance forces on October 7, 2023, and lightly edited for publication seven months into the hellish Israeli genocide in Gaza. In view of this new context, it is fitting, in closing, to examine one final work, a 2010 presidential portrait by G. Peter Jemison, which elaborates these connections and links them to our present circumstances.

Hanundagonyus (Two Georges)

G. Peter Jemison, 2010, pastel on paper (courtesy of the artist)

This work, titled Hanundagonyus (Two Georges), portrays Continental Army commander George Washington from the waist up in formal pose and military attire. It is reminiscent of renderings by John Trumbull, Samuel King, and Rembrandt Peale, but with George W. Bush—the other George—peering over his shoulder, almost as a second head. Below, a coal black hand slinks out and wraps around Washington’s torso, its silhouette conspicuous against the general’s blue and yellow war garb. As interlinked personas, the portrait of these two figures encapsulates the long trajectory of accumulation by waste that has shaped the American empire from the colonial period to the modern day.

The image of Bush, in Jemison’s visual critique, brow furrowed with a guarded, sidelong gaze, does not occupy the typical primacy of the presidential portrait: that space is reserved for his forebear, Washington, the central figure. Bush appears, instead, to tilt his head forward to emerge from behind the body of Washington, as if peeling away from, or being excreted by, this historical corpus. Indeed, some visual ambiguity caused by the low curve of the left-side arm leaves it an open question as to whom the appendage belongs—is it Washington’s, Bush’s, or both, a sort of fused body part? The consistent shade of blue seemingly ties it to the former’s wool coat while the absence of ruffled cuffs, seen arm opposite, in favor of the tapered cut of modern professional attire, suggests Bush has extended his grasp across Washington’s body, embracing him; but that gesture seems impossible relative to Bush’s physical orientation: the curve of the arm is too low, the arm too long. In this way, Jemison has merged the bodies—and, this being in the portrait mode, the legacies—of the military commander Washington and the commander in chief Bush. They are synthesized as counterparts along a continuum, in which Bush is staged by, and follows in the path of, Hanundagonyus, the town destroyer.

As an old symbol of organized violence, the coal black hand snaking between the two men appears, in the end, not unlike the imperialist system itself: it unites the commanders into a single entity while remaining independent of them, outside of them, both at their disposal and guiding their actions. From the standpoint of accumulation by waste, the de-development regime imposed on the Six Nations during the 18^th century parallels the U.S.-led imperialist project in the Arab-Iranian region today, in which occupation and war, Zionist settler colonialism, and U.S. neocolonialism have devastated the nations of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Palestine, and Yemen, and which seek to destroy the national sovereignty of anti-imperialist bulwarks, chiefly Iran. The decimating sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s followed by the Bush Administration’s war of decapitation turned brutal occupation and counterinsurgency not only killed over a million people; it shattered the country’s territorial integrity and industrial capacity in a naked grab for control of oil resources and revenues. In this way, the Iraq War, an illegal invasion, underscores the post-Cold War global realignment of monopoly capital in the form of U.S.-led neoliberal accumulation, to be forced on recalcitrant states in attempt to pressure others into compliance on the threat of military intervention and state collapse.⁸³ It is for this reason that Jemison groups the “Georges” into a dual portrait that figures them as two sides of the same coin, separated by time but not by deed, as evidenced by the usurpation and destruction of Iraq.

Despite the nominal end of the Iraq War and the partial withdrawal of U.S. troops, the projection of U.S. imperialism through military force in the wider region continues unabated. As Kadri writes, “The Palestinians in particular, and the Arabs of the Fertile Crescent in general, have endured a significant death toll related to imperialist aggression.”⁸⁴ At this moment in time, it is impossible to put into words the scale of genocidal devastation that Zionism and U.S. imperialism have unleashed upon the people and the land of Palestine, having targeted and attacked, in the clearest possible summary of annihilatory town destruction, any and all physical and social infrastructure and instruments of social reproduction in Gaza, including hospitals, libraries, schools, housing, bakeries, churches, mosques, refugee camps, news offices, cultural sites, and on and on. The devastation directly echoes Washington’s military orders in 1779, in which he instructed: “to lay waste all the settlements around with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed,” also dictating, “you will not by any means listen to (any) overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.” But just as Haudenosaunee guerrillas thwarted the eradication of Six Nations society through techniques of irregular warfare and tactical evasion, it is the armed resistance of the numerous Palestinian resistance factions—as well as regional allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansar Allah in Yemen—that continues to defend Palestine and confront and harass the U.S.-backed Zionist aggressor. Indeed, literalizing the joint struggle against settler colonialism by the Palestinian resistance and the Haudenosaunee resistance, the flag of the Mohawk Warrior Society was raised atop a destroyed bakery alongside a Jenin Brigade sign in the occupied West Bank city and refugee camp of Jenin on May 26, 2024 after an Israeli military raid and attack there, as captured in a photograph shared on Instagram by Palestinian-Canadian artist Rehab Nazzal and reposted by the Good Shepherd Collective and Palestine Action US.⁸⁵

The Flag of the Indigenous Kanien’kehá (Mohawk) Nation in the Jenin Refugee Camp in occupied West Bank, Palestine

Rehab Nazzal, May 2024, digital photograph (courtesy of the artist)

Ultimately, Jemison’s Hanundagonyus summarily encapsulates the epigraph that began this article: “Every U.S. war is an imperialist war, and all are an extension of the Indian Wars.” The coupling of the two heads of state across time into the form of a single figure, a death-dealer, visualizes the U.S. project as a violent enterprise driving the town destroying usurpation of “Indian Country” the world over, from Turtle Island to Iraq and Afghanistan to Palestine.⁸⁶ To that end, it is the complete dismantlement of the American empire, and nothing less, that is needed to avert the ongoing catastrophe, the accumulation by waste far into the future, of capital’s genocidal march, its unrepentant ruination of land and life. Thus, to invoke the Haudenosaunee Statement to the World one last time: “We direct to your minds that peace is not merely the absence of war, but the constant effort to maintain harmonious existence between peoples, from individual to individual and between humans and the other beings of this planet.”

Acknowledgements and Dedication

I wholeheartedly thank the artists who graciously lent their time and insights and granted image permissions for this article: Alan Michelson, Shelley Niro, G. Peter Jemison, Joan Linder, Jolene Rickard, and Rehab Nazzal. I am also grateful to my colleagues Aaron Katzeman, Marianna Davison, and Erin Stout for reading early drafts. This article is dedicated to the ongoing anti-colonial resistance in Turtle Island and Palestine and the worldwide struggle against imperialism. Resistance until victory.

Competing Interests

The author declares they have no competing interests.