Land & Environment

        When thinking about my relationship to ecology and the environment, since I'm from Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Land Rush always comes to mind, especially since my classmates and I "reenacted" it in 3rd grade, a peculiar form of naturalized eco-domineering, colonial propaganda played out as a fun day where we all go on a run and set up little picnic spots. Descriptions of this spectacular event of the frontier seem to foreshadow the underbelly of manipulation, broken-treaties, & unrestrained violence against native peoples and the environment that permeate and often give basis to structures of colonial domination like the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Parks Service (less now than its origin), and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Many of what would become the largest cities were already plotted out and marked before the signal to move on the "empty" land was even given, and the symbols of the rugged Cowboy and the cheating Sooner still embody the deeply identified-with rivalry of our two major college football teams at OSU & OU, respectively. In 7th grade, when we learned about & played the game The Oregon Trail, my image of Tom Cruise in Far and Away realizing his dream of having his own land and beating out the competition for his claim was quickly changed to a more brutal, maybe Hobbesian, picture of what life may have been like for settlers. A romantic view of native life would also be an injustice, but practices that embodied sustainability or any type of ethic with or to the land as anything other than artefact are hard to find for Western thinkers even in the most sympathetic reading of a Lockean property arrangement, which in most of the America's has the unspoken prior term of clearing the land or marking land as empty or passive with a complementary Humanist-Western-Chauvinist-Exceptionalism that marks nature (the feminine) and the native as other. 

    My own environmental ethic would probably be located between the thoughts of Felix Guattari (highly influenced by Deep Ecology and moving it into "three" ecologies of the natural/material environment, social life, and psychic worlds which all produce hybrid assemblages, all while maintaining a bodily machinist outlook that heterogenously unifies human and nonhuman agents and matter in plugging and unplugging processes) and Tuck & Yang and several other indigenous historians and theorists/activists that emphasize land-based pedagogies & non-metaphorical decolonization which tends to be in dialogue with settler-anthropogenic climate change & necessary steps to get out of or disrupt the incommensurable conditions of structural settler colonial violence.