La Paperson begins “A Ghetto Land Pedagogy: An Antidote for Settler Environmentalism” with a road map. First, Paperson says, “I analyze an Urban Ecology lesson as an illustration of how settler environmentalism employs the logic of terra sacer, or sacred/accursed land, to describe ghettos as wastelands ripe for rescue by ecological settlers” (115). Then, Paperson considers the Occupy movement “as settler signifier for social justice, an extension of the settler pursuit of land” (115). After that, the essay considers land in the San Francisco Bay area (115). “In contrast to place as a site of settler belonging and identity, this discussion heeds Goeman’s (2013) call to think through ‘storied land’ as an antidote to settler colonial vanishing,” Paperson writes. “Storied land offers a method of land education, by extending critical cartography’s spatial analysis with a temporal analysis implied by Indigenous struggle and Black resistance: the when of land, not just the where of place” (115). “A ghetto land pedagogy thus attends to an analysis of settler colonialism, offers a critique of settler environmentalism, and forwards a decolonizing cartography as a method for land education,” Paperson writes (115).
The essay’s first section begins with a paragraph discussing urban planner Robert Moses as an epitome of settler colonialism’s evolution, because his highway network “laid waste to Black and working class neighbourhoods” in New York City (116). “Ghetto colonialism is a specialization of settler colonialism in North America,” Paperson writes (116). It “takes place at this intersection between Indigenous displacement and black dislocation” because of the way that settler colonialism (in the United States and other locations where slavery was a central part of the economy) divides people into three groups: white settlers entitled to the land, Indigenous people who must be removed from the land, and black people who are chattel slaves (116). “For settlers seeking new frontiers, the ghetto serves as an interior frontier to be laid waste in order to renew,” Paperson continues. “It is a terra sacer, doubling as sacred and accursed land, a murderable nonplace always available for razing and resettlement” (116). Paperson is drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of homo sacer here (116). Indigenous land is the exterior frontier of imperialism, and the ghetto is its interior frontier: “the outcast, the alley and the underground” (116). According to Paperson, “[s]ettler colonial eyes see the ghetto as sacred wasteland that may be re-inhabited by anybody, with impunity” (117). This argument would be clearer if Paperson explored the way that land is both sacred and accursed simultaneously, rather than just mentioning Agamben’s use of the Latin term sacer. Sometimes an argument needs to slow down and engage with its audience in a more deliberate fashion.
For Paperson, “[t]erra sacer is a virulent variation of the settler colonial ideology of terra nullius, the colonial fiction of ‘empty land’ or ‘land not legally belonging to anyone. Nullius is the justification for the doctrine of discovery: that one can stab a flag into the earth or a needle into a person’s tissue and claim a colony” (117). The leap from a beach in the Caribbean in 1492 to the appropriation of genetic material without consent is a big one, but perhaps both are aspects of the same phenomenon. Terra nullius “is the founding covenant for settler colonial states” (117)—and it’s the basis of the Crown’s claim to ownership over land in Canada. However, as Paperson notes, land is usually not empty; instead, it must be made empty by declaring its inhabitants uncivilized and thus unworthy of the land they own (117).
“The duality of land as desecrated, in pain, in need of rescue; and land as sacred, wild, and preserve-able; are contemporary discourses that justify re-invasion,” Paperson contends. “They collapse Native land and black space together, leading once again to re-settlement” (117). Settlers come to see themselves as ecological stewards, worthy of reinhabiting a rehabilitated land (117). “In this ecological dystopia, Indigenous Americans are largely extinct through regrettable genocide, or survive spectrally through the settler’s Indian heart,” Paperson continues. “Terra sacer is a proxy for settler humanity; like the land, settlers view them/ourselves as traumatized yet healable. This is the settler adoption fantasy . . . that they/we can adopt the land and be adopted by the land” (117). I’m not sure how the idea of terra sacer ends up being a projection of the settler’s self, or how it is an adoption fantasy; again, Paperson needs to be a little more methodical in explicating these ideas. Paperson refers to the essay “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” here, in which Tuck and Yang disqualify settlers from any relationship to the land beyond exploitation and unjust occupation. That essay one of the most frustrating and hopeless things I’ve read, and to be honest, if Tuck and Yang are right, then there’s no point in my research at all—it is doomed to fail, it is pointless, it is worse than useless. That essay leaves no place for settlers to do anything other than unjustly occupy Indigenous land. Perhaps that’s accurate; perhaps it’s an overstatement.
The “ecological destruction that has accompanied settler colonialism” has been critiqued: “environmental racism,” “‘nature’ as rape-able,” and “‘development’ as the normalized aim of modernity” have all been critiqued (117). However, those critiques “can miss the core of Indigenous relationships to lands and communities, particularly the complex relationships between urban Indigenous land and life, not to mention between Indigenous, Black, and ghettoized communities” (117). In addition, environmentalism “has been largely silent on land, that is, silent on the settler colonial recasting of land into ‘environment,’ and silent on broader Indigenous understandings of land as ancestor, as sovereign, as people-places with their own politics and identities” (117-18). I’m reminded of the ways that the creation of national parks in Canada involved the expulsion of the Indigenous people living in those places, or of recent reports suggesting that biodiversity is higher on lands managed by Indigenous peoples (see Swiderska).
Here Paperson critiques the teaching of urban ecology at an Oakland high school as an example of “pain curriculum” that sets the stage “for a performance of environmentalist rescue” because it described “the negative consequences of the automobile” (118). I don’t know what to make of that. Does Paperson think the automobile has no negative consequences? Or that students shouldn’t learn about what making the automobile the centre of our transportation infrastructure has done to us or to our planet? The alternatives—public transit and cycling—“worked differently for white cosmopolitans than for ghettoized peoples” in the structure of the lesson, which taught a “metanarrative” within its “cartography of Oakland’s places and peoples”: “Downtown matters. Commuters count” (120). “Indeed, this urban ecology unit invited students to participate in their own disappearance: lend your voice to fixing the ghetto wasteland by paving bikeways and funding rapid commuter lines for the cosmopolitan citizen,” Paperson writes (120). I’m not sure if the critique here is of the lesson, or of public transit’s “metanarrative,” the way perhaps that transit systems tend to be designed on a hub-and-spoke principle that makes movement from one suburb to another difficult without going into the city centre as part of the journey—or if the complaint is that extending public transit to Oakland would enable gentrification that would price local people out of their own community (120). The latter, it seems, since Paperson devotes a paragraph to the effects of extending the transit system from San Francisco to Oakland. Is that an effect of transit, though, or of the outrageous real estate market in the Bay Area?
“Urban educators have few tools for engaging settler colonialism because terra sacer often under-girds environmental education in urban schools,” Paperson continues. “Environmental education offers three limited social justice frameworks: environmental racism—a framework that focuses on pain; green curriculum—a framework that focuses on rescue; and place-based curriculum—a framework that focuses on inclusion, and thus, the replacement of Native land/people with a multicultural immigrant nation” (120). Again, the suggestion that “pain” needs to be avoided baffles me. Students living in a city like Oakland might have direct experience of environmental racism, so why not acknowledge that experience by talking about it? What is the goal of environmental education, according to Paperson? Does “place-based curriculum” always occur at the expense of Indigenous perspectives? According to Paperson, “when strung together, such pedagogies concerning US ghettos contain a settler colonial teleology” (120).
Here Paperson turns to “[p]ain curriculum,” which “highlights, legitimately, the disproportionate toxification of air, soil, and water in poor, urban, communities of color” (120). And not just those communities, either: climate change doesn’t discriminate. In any case, Paperson continues: “reducing ghettos to pain-filled sites of environmental toxicity in need of salvation, echo[es] the settler colonial logics of terra sacer—wasteland whose inhabitants lack the liberal capitalist insights and technological know-how to properly occupy a city” (120). Where does that conclusion come from? Doesn’t thinking about environmental racism condemn those “liberal capitalist insights” for using their “technological know-how” to dump waste on communities whose protests can be ignored because they lack the power to resist the forces of capital and of governments captured by capital?
“Rescue curriculum,” on the other hand, focuses on green technologies and “the technologies of government” as solutions, but the subtext of this curriculum is, for Paperson, hidden: “The hidden curriculum of rescue naturalizes city planning, urban redevelopment, and de-ghetto-ification as inevitable remedies for pain. It positions ghettoized communities as wards under settler colonial sovereignty” (120). In addition, rescue curriculum “promotes green cities, a wealth of green consumption through which the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen earns his/her/our right to be the nouveau settler. Enter place-based curriculum” (120). I’m not sure what Paperson would propose instead of this “rescue curriculum”: green technologies are unlikely to save us from ourselves, but does that mean we should ignore their existence? Do green technologies really displace ghettoized communities or remove their agency? I am not following this argument.
Finally, Paperson takes on place-based curriculum. It “helps write the master narrative of future, green, metropolitan neo-colonies. Often inclusive, multicultural, and celebratory, such curriculum highlights the urban as a place of diversity, flavored by communities of color” (120). This fantasy “violently erases Indigenous understandings of that land and place,” Paperson argues. “If Native people are mentioned at all, they are almost always only as a premodern population who were pleasantly ‘one with nature,’ or ecological Indians so few in number that the ecological settler becomes a ‘good neighbour’ or benevolent reinhabitant” (121). This fantasy “inscribes settler colonialism as a done deal, renders urban native youth as inauthentic Indians, and denies contemporary Native relationships to land and place” (121). This curriculum contains a hidden teleology: “native people used to live here. White people settled here; they fled. People of color replaced white people; they suffer. Coming up, the multicultural cosmopolitan citizen will replace people of color. When the Great American City is finally built, all the white people will be colorful, and all the colored people will be gone” (121). I wonder where Paperson sees their own experience in this narrative. Where do they live? What is their relationship to ghettoized people of color or to Indigenous people? As in “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” I get the sense here that the best thing for everyone would be white people leaving—that’s the point, I think, of Tuck and Yang’s fantasy about Natty Bumppo leaving or vanishing from the land he unjustly occupies:
In the unwritten decolonial version of Cooper’s story, Hawkeye would lose his land back to the Mohawk—the real people upon whose land Cooperstown was built and whose rivers, lakes, and forests Cooper mined for his frontier romances. Hawkeye would shoot his last arrow, or his last long-rifle shot, return his eagle feather, and would be renamed Natty Bumppo, settler on Native land. The story would end with the moment of this recognition. Unresolved are the questions: Would a conversation follow after that between Native and the last settler? Would the settler leave or just vanish? Would he ask to stay, and if he did, who would say yes? These are questions that will be addressed at decolonization, and not a priori in order to appease anxieties for a settler future. (Tuck and Yang 17)
Paperson, of course, is Yang—his faculty web site says that “[s]ometimes he writes as la paperson, an avatar that irregularly calls” (“Wayne Yang”)—and I see a crossover in the ideas expressed in the two essays. What I’m not seeing, yet, in either essay is a sense of where Yang positions himself and his experience, or any sense that settlers have any kind of future other than erasure. For Tuck and Yang, and for Paperson, there seems to be no way that settlers and Indigenous peoples can co-exist.
Paperson is “deeply ambiguous about critical environmentalisms, such as movements in eco-feminism, deep ecology, and antiracist environmental justice. These are important trajectories in critical scholarship and activism around environmental justice, and ought to inform any decolonizing framework,” but they are “not automatically the opposite of settler colonialism” (121). Settler colonialism, in its guise of settler environmentalism, “describes efforts to redeem the settler as ecological, often focusing on settler identity and belonging through tropes of Indigenous appropriations—returning to the wildman or demigoddess, claiming of one’s natural or ‘native’ self and thus the land, again” (121). Living off the grid, for instance, “is a terra nullius imaginary of a somewhere, nowhere, neverplace where one is no longer a settler” (121). Really? We have solar panels on the roof of our house, but I don’t deny being a settler: I think that Paperson is being unfair and obtuse here. It’s possible to try to live in a way that doesn’t tie one to electricity generated by burning coal without fantasizing that one isn’t a settler. I know that from personal experience.
For Paperson, “greening the ghetto can mask a neoliberal curriculum of whitening the ghetto with ‘better-educated,’ ecologically ‘responsible,’ global citizens,” but more radical forms of environmentalism “can also uphold the settler fantasy of sacred ‘wilderness’—another form of unpeopled land—that must be restored or preserved” (121). It can, sure, but is that fantasy inevitable? We know that Indigenous peoples managed the land for millennia, and that Indigenous science provides insights into ways that we can stop ourselves from destroying the environment we depend on for our survival (see Buckiewicz). How current are those fantasies of a sacred wilderness, empty of human presence, when we know that wilderness is replete with signs of Indigenous presences? Could one accuse Paperson of being somewhat reductive here?
Paperson quotes Indigenous writer Sandy Grande’s argument that “both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited” (qtd. 121), and suggests that “[s]ocial justice endeavors all take place on Native land,” before turning to the Occupy movement. I’m not that interested in the Occupy movement, which seems to have run its course—besides, I read Craig Fortier’s Unsettling the Commons: Social Movements Within, Against, and Beyond Settler Colonialism,a book-length critique of that movement, when I was studying for my comprehensives—so I’m going to skip over the way that Occupy Oakland failed to address issues related to decolonization and instead turn to Paperson’s discussion of critical cartography as a method. “Critical cartography is the mapping of structural oppression, as well as the critique of mapping as an exercise of power,” they write. “Although it uses tools from traditional cartography, it also redirects our gaze back onto the master narrative of maps. Mapping creates taxonomies of land, water, and peoples. It generates false territories and also false temporalities, as land becomes property in a linear history of shifting ownerships. Mapping is knowledge generated in the service of empire” (123). So, maps are not in themselves critical, “even if they document social injustice” (123). Rather, the stories told about maps, the narratives that surround them, may be critical (123). For Paperson, “[c]ritical cartography is an essential method for understanding the coloniality of space” (124).
Yet, according to Paperson, “critical cartography is not by itself a decolonizing method, just as deconstructing coloniality is not the same as decolonization” (124). Paperson cites Linda Tuhiwai Smith to argue that a decolonizing methodology “repatriates Indigenous land and life as they have survived before, during, and beyond colonialism” (124). “Decolonization is not just symbolic,” Paperson contends: “its material core is repatriation of Native life and land, which may be incommensurable with settler re-inhabitation of Native land. It is not a stance that grants an easy solidarity with more inclusive social justice projects—even if they are antiracist, feminist, or environmentalist” (124). Indeed, the incommensurability of decolonization with “settler re-inhabitation of Native land” would suggest a very difficult solidarity with social justice projects that involve settlers, since decolonization would apparently require the erasure or departure of settlers from Turtle Island.
Paperson explains the difference between place and space, on the one hand, and land on the other:
Land is not generalizable the way space and place are generalizable. Land is both people and place, that is, Native people constitute and are constituted by Native land. You was where you lived. Indigenous place-based education is land education. Place-based education, from a settler perspective, is far more inclusive—place becomes something everyone can claim, can tell a story about. Place-based education leads to restorying and re-inhabitation, whereas land education leads towards repatriation. (124)
So, if I’m reading Paperson correctly, settlers cannot use the term “land”; it is a term that is to be used by Indigenous people only, because it addresses the relationship between Indigenous peoples and their land. “Storied land moves place back, between, and beyond to Native land, providing a transhistorical analysis that unroots settler maps and settler time,” Paperson continues, suggesting, again, that the notion of storying land is also unavailable to settlers—because that would be a form of re-inhabitation, a recolonization (124). If this is true, what does it mean for the course I just finished, or for my larger research project? Nothing good, I fear.
Paperson now turns to specific sites near Oakland: the Mission Dolores in San Francisco, the Chevron refinery, San Quentin penitentiary, Alcatraz, and other prisons around San Francisco Bay, in what I think might be an example of restorying (124-25). “Despite being narrated as ghosts, as people long-gone, Indians are enough of a corporeal problem for the settler agenda that California has never stopped trying to legislate them out of the land,” Paperson writes (125). Part of that process of legislation allowed for Indian children to be removed from their families and sold into slavery (126). As I read Paperson’s words, I’m listening to an Elder from Cowessess First Nation, Florence Sparvier, describing her experience at Marieval Indian Residential School, where to date 751 unmarked graves have been discovered, and I’m thinking about the ways that legislation removed First Nations children from their families and then did not punish churches or the government for their negligence in caring for those children—because, perhaps, their physical deaths were as much part of the goal of those schools as were the deaths of their languages and cultures. The history is sickening—and it’s not really history, since it reverberates in the present.
Paperson alludes to a project he helped to create in which young men from Oakland took classes from men serving life sentences at San Quentin. He refuses to give details about that project, except to say that it “provided outlawed wisdoms to be transmitted in the only form possible: storytelling” (126). Linked to that project was another in which activist Cesar Cruz brought gang-affiliated youth together, teaching them “to seek the sacred in between the cracks of desegregation” (126). Again, Paperson refuses to talk about those stories, except “to say that within them, the coloniality that dislocated black/brown/red/yellow/white peoples became their node of convergence as people relocated to Ohlone land” (126). I don’t understand what that means.
Finally, Paperson arrives at their conclusion: a discussion of the Shellmound Peace Walks organized by the group Indian People Organizing for Change. “Walks to the shellmound burial sites around the ancestral, unceded Ohlone lands: covering nearly 300 miles over 3 weeks at 18 miles a day, from Vallejo to San Jose to San Francisco,” they write (127). Indigenous people have always lived in the Bay Area: it “was a place of transboundary relationships among different Ohlone and Miwok people” (127). The Bay Area is not “an urban Commons to be re-inhabited, but Ohlone land, a social place, a place from which one misses home and a place to which one can enact some desires to leave home. As an intertribal place, Native-Native relations to Ohlone land and to each other can teach us valuable lessons in re-imagining ethical forms of solidarity beyond the ecological Commons,” they write (127).
Storied land is a partial answer to the question of how to uproot settler maps of territory (127). “A poetics of land learns from human resistance to mapping, from peoples’ and nature’s transgressions of maps, and from land itself as a bearer of memory,” Paperson writes. Land resists notions of fixed space, they continue, citing Mishuana Goeman (127). But those stories must be told by Indigenous peoples, not by settlers. “Why Huey Newton became free in prison, while Johnny Cash hated every inch of San Quentin, has to do with a fundamental colonial difference between people who see themselves as constituted by versus dwelling in accursed/sacred space,” Paperson writes, conferring Indigeneity upon Newton in a perhaps surprising move (127). So Newton was constituted by prison, while Cash saw it as accursed. I think I would have to read Agamben’s book, Homo Sacer, to begin to unpack this argument, because Paperson seems reluctant to explain the concept of terra sacer and its connection to homo sacer clearly, or else I’m just too thick to understand their explanation. But Paperson gives another example of being constituted by a sacred connection to the land in a story about Geronimo Pratt, a Black Panther leader who was held in solitary confinement for years (129). Pratt “spoke about his time in solitary confinement in sacred terms of connection with the earth and sky,” Paperson writes. “He described initially despising the ants who would come into his cell. Through humility, he learned to learn from the ants, who offered a connection to the earth through the cracks in the prison. According to Pratt, the ants loved him back, bringing him food and providing him company” (128). I wonder if that story could be expanded outside of a prison cell, perhaps to think about loving other abject creatures—quack grass or dandelions or leafy spurge—or if, again, that expansion would be a form of appropriation, this time an appropriation of Pratt’s experience. Paperson’s essay leaves me with so many unanswered questions like that one.
“A poetics of land is, because outlaw life and outlaw land inherently disrupt propertied life and land as property,” Paperson concludes. “As storied land contends with the current condition, settler colonialism, it elucidates pathways of de/colonization of land and people” (128). The essay ends with unanswered questions: “What are the colonial pathways that bring our people into this land? Where do our pathways diverge from Indigenous pathways? Where do they converge with settler colonial ones? In other words, what is our relationship to settler colonialism, to Indigenous survivance and tribal sovereignty?” (128). I sense Paperson implicating themselves here, in the pronoun “our,” as a settler, or at least as a non-Indigenous person, but I would like to see more of that self-implication. What is Paperson’s relationship to land as property? Do they own their own home? What is Paperson’s connection to either settler colonialism or Indigenous survivance? Where is Paperson in this argument, in other words? Perhaps the critiques made in this essay, and the activist pedagogical projects it describes, are intended to identify those connections, but while they suggest what’s wrong with settler environmentalism, they don’t offer any sense of how to create a form of environmentalism that doesn’t fall into those errors. So, as I’ve indicated in my comments as I read this essay—and this post is very much an immanent reading, a first encounter with the text, an admission of my failures to understand and my unanswered questions—I’m frustrated by this essay. Perhaps I should try again, but I’m not convinced that a second reading would increase my understandings or answer those questions. For the first time in ages, I find myself wishing for a seminar class in which a group of peers could try to unpack Paperson’s essay. That’s not on the agenda–the course for which I read this article is all over now, except for the final paper–and so I’m left somewhat confused about how it might relate to my research—or if it relates to my research at all, since as a settler, I’m part of the problem Paperson describes, rather than part of its solution.
Works Cited
Buckiewicz, Amanda. “How Indigenous science could help us with our sustainability and diversity crisis.” Quirks and Quarks, CBC Radio, 4 June 2021. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jun-5-shark-extinction-event-caffeine-can-t-keep-you-functional-the-pachyderm-s-proboscis-and-more-1.6052388/how-indigenous-science-could-help-us-with-our-sustainability-and-diversity-crisis-1.6052394.
Paperson, La. “A Ghetto Land Pedagogy: An Antidote for Settler Environmentalism.” Environmental Education Research, vol. 20, no. 1, 2014, pp. 115-30. DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2013.865115.
Swiderska, Krystyna. “Protecting indigenous cultures is crucial for saving the world’s biodiversity.” The Conversation, 14 February 2020, https://theconversation.com/protecting-indigenous-cultures-is-crucial-for-saving-the-worlds-biodiversity-123716.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630.
“Wayne Yang, Professor & Provost of John Muir College.” Ethnic Studies Department, UC San Diego, https://ethnicstudies.ucsd.edu/people/yang.html.
