“COLLAGE: LANDSCAPE” + “HORIZON LINES”:
EXCERPTS FROM “AGAINST EXTRACTION: INDIGENOUS MODERNISM IN THE TWIN CITIES”

The George Morrison Estate and Bockley Gallery thank author Matt Hooley and Duke University Press for the permission to reprint “Collage: Landscape” (Prologue) and “Horizon Lines” (Epilogue) from Hooley’s 2024 book, Against Extraction: Indigenous Modernism in the Twin Cities (Duke University Press, 2024). The two excerpts offer new, interdisciplinary, place‑based insight and context to the life and practice of celebrated artist George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe, 1919‑2000). 

“In Against Extraction Matt Hooley traces a modern tradition of Ojibwe invention in Minneapolis and St. Paul from the mid‑nineteenth century to the present as that tradition emerges in response to the cultural legacies of US colonialism. Hooley shows how Indigenous literary and visual art modernisms challenge the strictures of everyday life and question the ecological, political, and cultural fantasies that make multivalent US colonialism seem inevitable. Hooley analyzes literature and art by Louise Erdrich, William Whipple Warren, David Treuer, George Morrison, and Gerald Vizenor in relation to histories of Indigenous dispossession and occupation, enslavement and Black life, and environmental harm and care. He shows that historical narratives of these cities are intimately bound up with the violence of colonial systems of extraction and that concepts like Indigeneity and sovereignty extend beyond treaty‑granted promises of political control. These works, created in opposition and proximity to the extraction of cultural, political, and territorial resources, demonstrate how Indigenous claims to life and land matter to rethinking and unmaking the social and ecological devastations of the colonial world.” —Duke University Press

The George Morrison Estate, with the University of Minnesota’s George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts and the Department of Art’s Visiting Artists and Critics Program, host scholar Matt Hooley, Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Dartmouth College, for his lecture, “George Morrison: Landscapes Against Extraction” on Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 12:00‑1:00PM followed by a reception at INFLUX Lecture Hall, Regis Center for the Arts, University of Minnesota. All are welcome. Wheelchair accessible and free admission.

Prologue
Collage: Landscape

In 1965, George Morrison started making landscapes out of driftwood. He gathered wood from Atlantic beaches near Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he rented a studio on breaks from teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. He looked for scraps of wood grayed and weathered by the sea to the brink of abstraction, but that also bore some trace of human use or attachment (“bits of paint, half worn off,” “rust stains or colors soaked in,” “the top of an old scrub brush”).¹ Morrison began each landscape, which he also called “wood collages” and “paintings in wood,” by fitting together a few pieces in the bottom left corner of the frame that, along the broken lines of driftwood edges, gathered out into massive sweeps and rivulets of fragments to fill frames up to fourteen feet wide and five feet tall. Setting off the top quadrant of each collage, a single, twisted but unbroken line—a horizon line—is the only gesture spared from the turbulence of fracture and motion that characterizes the landscapes.

Morrison was born in 1919, in a house near the shore of Lake Superior, a member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.² He was sent to a boarding school in Wisconsin, attended and graduated from the Minneapolis School of Art, and in 1944 moved to New York, where he made and showed work alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline. During the years he lived on the East Coast, Morrison was excluded from exhibitions of “Indian art” that were coming into fashion in the US art market. In 1948, the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa rejected his work, noting that it “was not painted in the traditional manner of your forefathers.” And even when the Philbrook eventually did accept Morrison’s work in 1964, the curator wrote to Morrison that she “was aware that [Morrison was]… not an artist in the ‘Indian style.’”³ Although this question of whether his work belonged in the category “Indian art” did not preoccupy Morrison, it is one that continues to dominate criticism of his work.⁴ One reason, perhaps, is that Morrison began making driftwood landscapes just as he decided to move back to Minnesota in 1970 to join the faculty of the country’s first American Indian studies program at the University of Minnesota, a move, he wrote, that was inspired by an “Indian connection… [and] the need to put certain Indian values into my work.”⁵ His move to the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul), for which the driftwood landscapes became an avatar, is often interpreted as a pivot from an abstract period to a politically and ideologically situated one—a homecoming that structures a narrative of development in the life of a path‑­making Indigenous modernist.

Questions about the Indigenousness of art often displace questions about the Indigenousness of the places where that art is made and shown. It is a critical habit that has unfortunately structured much of the history of the interpretation of Morrison’s work. Writing against that habit is one reason I wanted to write this book, to ask: How can we read art and place together under conditions of ongoing colonialism? Can practices of cultural interpretation denaturalize the coloniality of place and at the same time show how Indigenous art‑making is always also Indigenous place‑­making? While these questions motivated this book, it is still important to me that the book not be mistaken as an attempt to resolve them. Therefore, before I turn to the central arguments and archives in the introduction, I want to use this prologue to stage these questions—not to answer them but to hold them open. This prologue is an experiment in writing the politics of art, Indigeneity, and land together that I hope will also function as an invitation for others to join in the urgent decolonial work of continually rewriting the entangled histories of place‑­ and art‑making to which each of us is connected.

Extraction and Cultural Interpretation

When Morrison returned in 1970, the Twin Cities seemed to be remaking itself. A city whose political and economic life had always centered the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers and the milling industries those rivers powered, was emptying itself into suburbs. Strategically devalued Black, Brown, and Indigenous neighborhoods were obliterated by a new interstate system as the manufacturing jobs on which those neighborhoods economically depended were replaced by the rise of a finance and retail economy increasingly situated in the suburbs. The Twin Cities’ transformation is a familiar story of “urban crisis” in the United States, but one that hinged in more immediately identifiable ways than it did in other US cities on the unresolved contradiction of the social and jurisdictional form of the city that depends on the recurrent displacement and absorption of Indigenous people and land relations. In the 1960s and 1970s, the contradictions of Indigenous displacement and absorption was most famously manifest in the rise of the American Indian Movement.⁶ Like other urban anti‑racist and decolonization movements, AIM demanded equal access to employment, health care, safety, and education. What distinguished AIM’s insurgency, from Alcatraz Island to the National Mall in Washington, DC, was the way it used occupation as a style of protest in order to denaturalize the settler city as a primary or coherent social and jurisdictional form. In one sense, the history of that denaturalization begins in the Twin Cities, where AIM started as a cop watch system, a street patrol, two Indigenous schools, and a local health care and legal support system before it became a national organization.

Only a few months after Morrison arrived in Minnesota, AIM occupied the Naval Air Station in Minneapolis: an unused military facility associated with Fort Snelling, the original colonial installation in Minnesota situated on a Dakota sacred site and adjacent to Wita Tanka, or “Pike Island,” where thousands of Dakota people were held in a concentration camp in 1862. Like the concurrent occupation of Alcatraz, the Naval Air Station occupation was premised on a common provision of US treaties (in this case, the 1805 Treaty of St. Peter) that afforded for the return of unused federal land to Indigenous people. AIM demanded that the Naval Air Station be redeveloped as an Indigenous school, a demand that city and federal officials immediately Rejected.⁷ However the broader effect of AIM occupations like this one was to demonstrate the spatial and historical incoherence of the jurisdictional form of the settler city itself, to indicate its internal and irreparable broken edges, and to insist that those edges—never the spaces of vacancy or pathology the city made them out to be—were sites of abiding political motion.

As soon as Morrison arrived in the Twin Cities, he became an active member of AIM. At the same time, his driftwood landscapes were embraced by the cities’ most powerful settler corporations and cultural institutions. He sold driftwood collages to the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA), General Mills, Honeywell, and Prudential—all organizations whose wealth depended on the seizure and extraction of Indigenous life and land.⁸

He had a solo show at the Walker Art Center, a gallery named and funded by lumber baron T. H. Walker, and received public art commissions for a wood statue exhibited in a skyscraper named for the French explorer René‑­Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and a granite collage built into a pedestrian mall named for Jean Nicolet, the French explorer sometimes credited with “discovering” the Great Lakes. How these corporations and institutions misread Morrison’s work, and why they were interested in using that work to attach themselves to a narrative of the frontier past and neoliberal future of US colonialism, gets to questions at the heart of this book about how colonialism attempts and fails to control the meaning of art, about how colonial political and aesthetic forms are produced by the management of belonging, and about how we can clarify the always‑­material, always‑ecological stakes of strug­gles around aesthetics and power, colonialism and decolonization. At a moment characterized both by insurgent assertions of urban Indigenous space and by systematic disinvestment from the cities’ central Black and Indigenous neighborhoods, settler corporations and institutions leveraged a particular and violently constrained idea of the “Nativeness” of Morrison’s art to facilitate a transformation of the spatial and economic order of the city. Here, Nativeness was not understood as a radical counterclaim to the operation of US colonialism but rather as a minority cultural aspect of it. I argue that, as such, colonial institutions misinterpreted Morrison’s work and its relation to modern Indigeneity by obscuring the aesthetic and political invention to which that work was actively committed.

The first landscape Morrison sold after moving back to Minnesota is titled Collage IX: Landscape. The piece is made of driftwood that he brought from the Atlantic coast, and that he collected from the “alleys and backyards” of his neighborhood in St. Paul.⁹ Like all of his collages, it is a study of material in social and historical relation. Morrison immersed himself in the process (“the chance element”) of “taking driftwood or discarded wood and playing one piece against the other.”¹⁰ The patterns of “color, shape, and texture” that emerge are functions of Morrison’s own manipulation and of the possibilities or limits of attachment manifest in each piece. Those patterns are ornate, massive, and mutating, and they express within the piece’s huge frame a multidimensionality of motion beyond the vertical and horizontal, a coruscation of density, gesture, and reference. The complexity of this effect is intentional and has to do with how the wood pieces‑­in‑­pattern express a present of exposition and, like a shoreline, gather the residue of moving histories of growth, harvest, commodification, shipment, use, and disposal that mingle below and beyond that present. For Morrison, those histories were insistently environmental and social, and they generate an animating tension that never resolves into familiar postures of presence or absence, location or loss. 

Collage, for Morrison, is both a response to the formal operation of colonial extraction and a practice of ecological invention. In a formal sense, Morrison’s interest in collage is plainly unrecuperative. The pieces of driftwood he used are not joined to represent or restore what of them was lost to extraction, and in this sense collage does not refer to a total effect of fragments rearranged into pattern. In Morrison’s work, collage is better understood as attention to the formal and affective generativity of wood worn—in odd angles and unnatural lightness, and in subtly incurvate or arching sanded surfaces—to extractive remains. It is a practice that collects both wood arrayed in a fluid pattern and the interstitial spaces between each piece, and thereby creates a formal tension between what, of each piece of driftwood, it is and is not possible to connect. Morrison remembered the history that preceded the wood’s inclusion in the collage (“There was an interesting history in those pieces—who had touched them, where they had come from”) and its eventual decay (“The wood won’t last forever, I know that”).¹¹ Thus we can read the gaps between driftwood pieces as a space not of loss but of organic exchange—where, within the collage, the pieces literally gather and decay together. 

If, for Morrison, collage is a way of gathering with and among the absent, the other primary formal framework of the piece—landscape—is a rethinking of the sociality of setting. The term is one that Morrison hesitated around or qualified when he talked about the collages. “I think a respectful, knowledgeable person,” he reflected, “would know that they’re paintings in wood, landscapes.”¹³ Later, he added: “I imagine that people see the wood first. They don’t look at it as a landscape painting, though it’s subtitled Landscape. They may not even see the horizon line at first. The initial appeal comes from the wood itself, from the tactile surface.” In a colonial context, as W. J. T. Mitchell notes, landscape is “a medium” and a making, an enclosure fantasy. Landscape is the imagination of space primally unclaimed but through whose mixing of proximity and spaciousness property is remade as an effect of seeing, “‘the dreamwork’ of imperialism.”¹⁴ In Morrison’s collage, these dynamics are referenced and actively thwarted. For Morrison, landscape is also a medium and is concerned with how art participates in the politics of space. But whereas imperial landscape derives a rhetoric of control out of a construction of spatial ideality (“the antithesis of ‘land’”), Morrison’s landscape problematizes interpretive control by revealing the generative indistinction between space and land. As he points out, the experience of observing the collage is one that frustrates the acquisitive choreography of spectacle: “They don’t look at it as a landscape.” Rather, the force of the collage is affective. The piece draws the observer to it, to touch it, in “an appeal,” as Morrison points out, that “comes from the wood itself.” The effect, then, is not the abstraction of or from an idea of land but a feeling of being overcome by the materiality of land, even in the moment of observing the collage in the gallery. Morrison’s landscape makes land and, as such, resets the terms of its encounter beyond interpretation, closer, perhaps, to something like the terms of relation.

The MIA purchased Collage IX: Landscape in 1975, the year after it completed a massive, $30 million expansion to its main building. Designed by the renowned Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, the addition was intended to modernize and expand the museum’s founding democratic concept: a public exhibition space joined to an art school and a theater. As a part of that expansion, the museum updated its curatorial scheme, adding the department first called Primitive Art before it was renamed Art of Africa and the Americas, in which Collage IX: Landscape would be exhibited. The MIA is situated in a neighborhood that became the vibrant center of Indigenous life and organizing in Minneapolis in the aftermath of postwar white disinvestment. Originally, it was land seized from Dakota people in the mid‑­nineteenth century by settler John T. Blaisdell.¹⁵ Blaisdell sold the lumber and eventually some of the land itself to Dorilus Morrison, a man who started the city’s first industrial sawmill and eventually became Minneapolis’s first mayor. Dorilus Morrison made a fortune milling lumber harvested from all over the state, including from thousands of acres of pine forest he bought himself—land that had been acquired through a treaty with Ojibwe leaders in 1837 whose terms (e.g., the provision of Ojibwe hunting and fishing rights) were never upheld by the United States.¹⁶ In 1911, Dorilus Morrison’s son, Clinton, donated the land the family bought from Blaisdell to Minneapolis for the construction of a museum whose founding principle, characteristic of early twentieth‑century progressivism, was (in the words of its first director, Joseph Breck) to liberate the museum from the model of “‘the storehouse’ [or]… ‘prison of arts’” and to “extend no less cordial a welcome to the humbler amateurs than… to ‘carriage folk.’”¹⁷

Like the other corporations and institutions that acquired George Morrison’s collage landscapes in the early 1970s, the MIA is an effect and a technology of extraction. Here and throughout this book, extraction is a cultural and an ecological concept; it signals both how forms of colonial belonging proliferate around Indigenous land dispossession and how those forms remake themselves through the management of ecological meaning. Thinking about the MIA through the lens of extraction is less about singling out that institution—or even the institutional form of the museum—than it is about showing how colonial cultural forms that organize the politics of belonging function as thresholds of the constant transformations of land, capital, and power on which the broader operation of US colonialism depends. For instance, the museum’s self‑concept as a public institution is only possible through a recurrence of Indigenous alienation: of the land under the museum, of the trees and water through which Dorilus Morrison made a fortune, of the civic investment that city officials directed to a colonial museum in an Indigenous neighborhood instead of the Indigenous school that AIM asked to be installed on the abandoned naval air station. And each such recurrence elaborates its publicness in a particular way, as a derivative of what Dene scholar Glen Coulthard calls “persistent” colonial accumulation, as a primal symbol of colonial occupation (what Jean O’Brien calls “firsting”), and as a threshold from or into which Indigenous life can be categorically excluded or assimilated.¹⁸ Thus the museum, like other colonial institutions, transforms multiple spatial, economic, and political operations of extraction into a differential experience of access. For those it reproduces as subjects of extraction, it makes access (to land, to capital, to the public, to knowledge of what is excluded from the public) available and ideologically defining. For the people and the ecological relations it reproduces as objects of extraction, it makes being available to access ontologically defining.

The MIA’s acquisition of Collage IX: Landscape helped define Morrison as an Indigenous modernist for the art world and for the Twin Cities in part by exhibiting the piece in the Primitive Art and then Art of Africa and the Americas department. By curating the work in this way, the MIA used Morrison to institutionalize a relationship between modernity and Indigeneity that erases the specificity of Indigenous claims to land. In the shift from Primitive Art to Art of Africa and the Americas, the MIA replaced a violent temporal (anachronizing) universalization of Indigeneity with a spatial (globalizing) one—a tactic Joanne Barker terms the “racialization of the Indian,” in which “the notion that indigenous peoples are members of sovereign political collectivities is made incomprehensible… [by] collaps[ing] indigenous peoples into minority groups that make up the rainbow of multicultural difference.”¹⁹ The fact that Morrison was a member of a tribal community whose expropriated land was the economic precondition for the MIA (itself also physically built on seized Dakota land) is transformed by a curatorial gesture that locates the museum in a global landscape of difference rather than evince the political contradictions of its spatial and temporal location. For Barker, “racialization” means replacing the treaty relationship between tribes and other nations with a political minority status, theorized in the Marshall Trilogy as a condition of “wardship.”²⁰ And as she and other Indigenous studies scholars have pointed out, that erasure is not singular but recurrent. It recurs whenever colonial structures are thrown into crisis, expand, or remake themselves, what Patrick Wolfe defines as the “structure not… event” of settler colonialism.²¹ Barker’s use of “racialization” in this context is comparative—in which Indigeneity stripped of its sovereign claim to land seems to make it comparable to positions of political minority already naturalized within US racial capitalism as landless and nonsovereign. However, the way colonial institutions used Morrison’s collages at this moment of urban transformation invites an elaboration of this theory of racialization to understand how the colonial construction of modern Indigeneity as landless also served the intrinsically anti‑Black discourse of civic revitalization.

In the aftermath of suburbanization, civic and business leaders invested in sites like the MIA and Nicollet Mall as spaces to return public interest to the downtown. In such spaces, Morrison’s collage landscapes—works whose aesthetic interest in fragment and pattern were misconstrued as thematizing political unity from individual difference—were exhibited as avatars of a new urban, multicultural public life.²² Here I am interested in how a discourse of the public “life” Morrison’s collages were used to ornament operated in the city both metaphorically and literally on the level of biology and ecology. As in other gentrifying cities, Twin Cities officials relied heavily on metaphors of health (lifeblood, vitality, and growth) and damage (blight, disease, decay) to advertise and fundraise for investments like the MIA expansion and the Nicollet Mall renovation. As in other cities, that rhetoric was deployed on behalf of a revitalization that produced new forms and distributions of environmental violence outside of revalued urban spaces. Because expressed interest in renewed urban spaces was economic, revitalization in the Twin Cities depended on a classic neoliberal model of financing and governance.

Remaking retail and cultural spaces “to bring life back to the street” depended on tax incentives and regulatory easements that concentrated profit around a few corporations and redistributed environmental vulnerability to poor and rural communities around the state and city.²³ Today the catastrophic toxification of the state’s soil and water as a result of manufacturing, mining, and toxic dumping by companies like 3M and Honeywell—who directly invested in and benefited from the cities’ revitalization—are only beginning to be understood.²⁴

Within the cities themselves, the ecological logic of urban revitalization also depended on the “dysselection” of Black life as the governing concept of public life.²⁵ That dysselection was literalized when white federal, state, and city officials routed the new interstate connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul (I‑94) through the Rondo neighborhood—the largest and most cherished Black neighborhood in St. Paul.²⁶ The destruction of 650 Black homes and over 100 Black‑­owned businesses in the name of heightened cultural and economic exchange between Minneapolis and St. Paul concretized the necropolitical logic of the cities’ public life. In the aftermath of the police murder of Philando Castile in 2016, anti‑­racist protesters trenchantly marked the legacy of this concept of public life by stopping traffic on I‑94, exactly at the site where the Rondo neighborhood once stood.²⁷

This prologue is an attempt to think about a work of art and a city together, to track the ways they are connected by genealogies of life and space in motion. At the same time, it is an effort to avoid repeating the reduction of both art and the city to and by colonial practices of interpretation, valuation, and recovery—the way the meaning of Morrison’s life, his work, and Indigenous people in Minnesota, for instance, have been managed through the cultural economies of extraction that I have outlined. In this sense, to think about art and place together is primarily an incitement to reading and writing differently. How do we think and write about—which is to say around or among—forms linked by moving histories of colonialism and decolonization, seizure and endurance, domination and repair?

In this book, I try to hold open the question of how to write about art and place together by attending to convergences of culture and power that do not resolve to ready formations of identity, jurisdiction, or discipline. I bookmark these convergences with the word against: an ambivalent term that signals the trenchant opposition to US colonialisms that characterizes all the texts I write about, and the inescapable sense of proximity—the spatial, ideological, and social friction—that is a condition of production of decolonial art and organizing. It is also a term that expresses key methodological features of Morrison’s collages, including their attention to generative possibilities of the meager, fraught, and collapsing spaces where ideas and materials in proximity are transformed but never resolved.

Writing‑­against as a mode of collaboration with difference is also important to me, a non‑­Indigenous person writing about Indigenous land and art. In one sense, it marks a familiar, and perhaps facile, aspiration to conditional alignment: that my writing can join the writing and organizing I describe in this book in opposing the legal, cultural, environmental, and political extraction that drives US colonialisms. But perhaps harder and more useful is the sense that this book is a challenge to account for the spatial, economic, and political proximity between the ideas and histories that have made me and the Indigenous land, people, and texts I consider here—a proximity uninvited by Ojibwe and Dakota people, and one structurally predisposed, as a function of colonialism, to my benefit. One reason to write this book is to ask if that proximity can mean something other than extraction, and that is also something other than resolution: if what can be made in that proximity can have meaning that does not just accrue to non‑Indigenous people, and if what can be unmade are inherited ideological and disciplinary dispositions that understand proximity as something to be claimed or defended against.

I have argued that where colonial infrastructures promise belonging, peace, immunity, and protection, what is being disguised is extraction. Where colonial infrastructures offer experiences of social or affective coherence, life and land are being redistributed. This is an account not so much of what US colonialisms make, but how they are made and how they recur. I began this book by observing that this argument creates an archival problem in the sense that the historical and disciplinary forms that situate it are expressions of the same extractive operation; thus the book does not deliver a coherent, cultural historical framework—like an Indigenous literary history of the Twin Cities—of its own. In tracing new constellations, or extraction histories, of colonial policy, cultural history, and Indigenous organizing, I have not closed archival gaps but, rather, have asked if, in holding them open, we can invite new relations among texts, people, and land that do not rely on inevitably extractive forms, including conventional forms of archive.

As I suggested in the introduction, the stakes of this project, of writing against extraction, are different depending on how readers and cultural producers are positioned by colonial infrastructures. For me, and for other people ostensibly protected by whiteness and settlement, those stakes are primarily deconstructive. In other words, I am interested in offering a language with which to describe and deconstruct the vacancy of the colonial forms that promise social and political coherence. However, even the work of description in this context can seem like an impossibility in the sense that I am proposing we address and then dismantle forms that organize everyday life without the promise of new ones to replace them—something I foregrounded by observing the impossibility of language with which to narrate simple and seemingly necessary things like where or who I am from, until colonialism itself is dismantled. Unlike the normative sociality secured by those forms, “impossible” as Derrida notes, “is not nothing. It is even that which happens, which comes, by definition.”²⁸ The work of redescribing, without promise, the gaps that colonial infrastructures make and in which we live, is how what is impossible—which is to say, the possibility of nonextractive relations—might yet still come. 

For Indigenous readers and cultural producers, it is not exactly for me to say what the histories of writing against extraction mean or make possible. In this book, however, I have centered the ambivalence of this word against as a space and as an acknowledgment of the fact that identifying—or even organizing—new cultural histories around proximity to colonial extraction does not have to be homogenizing. Suggesting that writing against, as in opposing, extraction is necessary for all people to stop colonial violence does not imply an equivocation of the differential proximities to colonialism produced by extractive infrastructures and by the ways, for instance, Indigenous cultural practices have defied and exceeded those infrastructures. In other words, the Indigenous intellectual histories I track in this book are not “lessons,” as Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi), Chris Caldwell (Menominee), and Marie Schaefer (Anishinaabe) put it, “for ‘all humanity.’”²⁹ Nor is it the case that my framing of those histories in terms of modernism suggests an alignment with US or European cultural canons. Against in this sense signals the question and the urgency of organizing life, land, and thought in ways that do not equivocate experiences of proximity to colonialism, but that do suggest that organizing with difference is possible, and that it makes it possible to expose the tenuousness and vulnerability of colonial power—the ways its breakdowns and failures can become the condition for as of yet unimagined ways of living.

The concepts that this book tracks as expressing colonial cultural and political coherence, as infrastructures that extract to create fictions of belonging, are also sites of breakdown in a recurrent colonial order that is necessarily infrastructural. One continuity among Warren’s, Erdrich’s, Treuer’s, and Vizenor’s writing is that they turn toward those sites and, with them, amplify the ambivalence of against, that is of the difficult and intimate work of thinking in proximity and opposition to extraction. In each chapter, I have observed how their methods of writing against extraction consistently generate modes of collaboration and political commitments that colonial infrastructures can­not redistribute and thus cannot bear: Warren’s autoethnographic interpretation; Erdrich’s theory of return as recovery with loss; Treuer’s imagination of superjurisdictional location; Vizenor’s participation in a trans‑­species, trans‑motive, unprotected gathering. That these writers participate in remaking life and land at sites of colonial breakdown is not a coincidence. Although what I call US colonialisms marks an elaborate and shifting array of systems designed to classify and redistribute almost anything under the rubric of interiority, and despite the way the United States obsessively confuses expansion with productivity, colonialism does not have a theory for making the material and social relations we might otherwise describe as land. Making somatic and social relations is what colonial infrastructures fail both to do and to manage, and thus the history of that work is a history of holding out against—that is, pressing (both as analysis and opposition) and thus interrupting colonialism’s incessant demand for reproduction.

While I have been writing this book, colonial reproduction is once again in the throes of crisis, what we are often given to call (in consummately equivocating and dehistoricizing terms) the climate crisis. In ordinary political discourse, this crisis is the theater for a debate about how to prevent the failure of those infrastructures that have made the United States seem coherent through the global administration of violence and suffering, and whether there is still time to reform those infrastructures such that they might continue to operate but pollute less. To frame the climate crisis in these terms is not to imply that the inevitability of its unfolding will be emancipatory, because, of course, the paroxysms of failing colonial infrastructures are themselves distributable and will be predictably directed toward people and land already marked as objects of extraction. However, it is also a mistake to allow the conditions of colonial infrastructural breakdown that we call the climate crisis to be interpreted within the binaries of political and ontological interiority that set it in motion in the first place. The texts that I have read in this book directly attend to the conditions of production of the infrastructures whose systemic breakdown is the contemporary climate crisis. While these texts do not offer lessons for all humanity about how to avert that crisis, they do articulate a shared political insistence and model a method for proliferating material and social meaning when and where colonial infrastructures break down. Where US officials point to those breakdowns as the limit of social and political meaning (in light of which the only possibility of rescue means rescuing colonial infrastructures), these texts elaborate the im/possibility of steadfastly thinking against extraction.

Beyond the Edge of the World

For George Morrison, the elaboration of impossible meaning has a specific shape: the horizon line. It is an element in almost all of his work. Sometimes, as in his collages, the horizon is stark, marking the lower edge of the work’s top quadrant; at other times, it is almost indiscernible or is unusually positioned at the bottom of or askance a canvas. Morrison often suggested that the inspiration for this element was the actual horizon line he observed regularly over Gitchi‑Gami/Lake Superior, both in his youth and his last years living on the Grand Portage reservation. Despite growing up next to the lake, the horizon line did not become a preoccupation in his work until slightly later in his life, when he moved away, first to Minneapolis and then to New York.

One way to interpret his horizon lines, then, in a biographical context, is as a form for memory, of return through memory, or of the possibility of remaking an aspect of social and somatic relation (i.e., land) against the limits of geography. However, remembering here could not imply a single temporal direction, as it seems clear that what, or the way, Morrison was remembering with the horizon was not only a looking back but also a posture of looking and imagining out or away from. “From the horizon,” he wrote, “you go beyond the edge of the world to the sky, and beyond that, to the unknown. I always imagine, in a certain surrealist way, that I am there. I like to imagine it is real.”³⁰ Here, “imagine” conveys a double sense of looking, at once back and away, and suggests that that ambivalence bears a specific relation to reality—that “imagine” is a particular kind of transitivity, a “way that I am there.” At the same time, by eliding the “that” that would make “that it is real” a noun clause qualifying “I like to imagine,” Morrison emphasizes the ineluctable distinction between imagination and reality; he remembers, that is, that what the horizon is or means is convergent but not coextensive with imagination. Finally, Morrison proposes that the directionality indicated by “beyond the edge of the world” can be both something to think back to and out from, because unlike a purely imaginative form, it is always at the same time a materiality, something “there” in the world and in his art.

In the last years of his life, Morrison returned to work in his studio overlooking Lake Superior. After suffering a heart attack and being diagnosed with Castleman’s disease, he moved from the Twin Cities to Grand Portage and gave his full attention to the horizon line. As a feature of the sky and the lake, Morrison describes the horizon as a perceptual event, comparable to the changing expression of the lake’s motion, texture, and mood: “Dramatic things happen in the sky, with clouds and color. A rough spot appears on the water way off in the distance, or very, very rough water starts toward shore, or a streak of light illuminates the horizon.”³¹ This convergence of sky and water is not formally stable: “It becomes the horizon at a given time of day, probably sunrise or sunset… It’s the same with anything in nature—light hitting a rock, then bouncing against the water. The shimmer of nature is coming through.”³² As an aspect of art‑making, the horizon is where elements transform through but do not become each other, a quality he names in terms of semantic surplus: “enigma,” “magic,” or, here, “ambiguity” and “mystery”: “I am fascinated with ambiguity, change of mood and color, the sense of sound and movement above and below the horizon line. Therein lies some of the mystery of paintings: the transmutation, through choosing and manipulating the pigment, that becomes the substance of art.”³³

For genres, discourses, and political formations conditioned by colonial power, the horizon as a demarcation of limit can be understood to “neutralize,” as Derrida puts it, the potentiality of transformation. Conceived as a marker of the recurrence of a teleology or as a point of inflection between what Derrida calls the “unforeseen” and “foreseeing,” the “horizon of an idea” is a kind of epistemic infrastructure, a way of distributing meaning away from potentiality to abstraction.³⁴ However, as in the quotation above, this is a sense Morrison carefully avoids by refusing to collapse the distinction between the materiality and discursivity of the horizon. For Morrison, the horizon is not a limit or an ontological recursion to teleology—in Derrida’s terms, what is to become (avenir) and what it is to become (devenir)—but instead what Derrida calls “a horizon without horizon.”³⁵ The horizon is what is always there anyway but that changes, and changes into and through, art. “The literal idea of space in a painting,” as Morrison cogently puts it.³⁶

Morrison turned back to, and out from the horizon, when he became terminally ill—that is, when the coherence and continuity of his world became catastrophically uncertain. Unlike the other texts I read in this book, for Morrison, at this moment, it was not an act of policy or the recurrent violence of colonial jurisdiction that precipitated crisis but the perhaps more prosaic form of subjectivity itself, the “horizontal ideality” of its ending, and the fact that that ending implied the end of his art‑­making.³⁷ During this last period of his life, he kept painting landscapes with horizon lines, but he also returned to methods that implicated the materiality of his media more complexly than his paintings did; methods including rubbing and frottage in which the history and substance of wood, and his own wood collages themselves, became elemental to composition. But like his paintings, these works extend a methodological interest in working at and beyond the edge where perceptual and interpretive forms falter but remain nonetheless real or material. Read alongside the other texts I consider in this book, Morrison’s rubbings underline a simple but important point: that the formations and concepts that organize the colonial world are not just aspects of policy, discipline, or the fortifications of settlement. Those infrastructures and their apparent limits are everywhere, even in everyday materials like scraps of wood and paper—even, for Morrison, in his own art. “Everywhere there is a horizon” as Derrida puts it, to be considered and to be pressed beyond failure through methods of intensifying proximity.³⁸

Against the Horizon

Morrison’s rubbings can be interpreted as a return to his wood collage practice. Especially in his larger wood‑rubbing pieces, the ambivalent invocation of landscape is clear and familiar. So, too, is tension that holds the work between juxtaposing valences: on the one hand, the force of the substantive similarity of the wood held tenuously out by interstitial gaps and, on the other, the sense of scalar breakdown, as the works read down from the genre of landscape to individual pieces of lumber and down further to the prehistories of those forms as once living elements of now unreferenceable forests. The rubbings are also returns to collage as a matter of compositional practice. They are remediations of the collages that he began making in 1965 but are so in such a way that translates the medial, historical, and proximal distance between themselves and those initial collages through an interest in the aesthetics of attenuation: the way the qualities of color, depth, and weight so elemental to the collages are indicated but lost, indicated as lost, or as imperfectly recollected. That Morrison described some of his rubbings as “wood impressions” conveys something of the melancholy mixing of familiarity and estrangement that was an effect of this decision to return to, but not re­‑create, the practice that marked the ascendance of his career decades earlier. Here “impression” means the technical sense of being produced by pressure or pressing as well as the waning sociality of a fleeting encounter. In both cases, it indicates an interest in externality as the condition of production, and even proliferation, of meaning, and that at the point he began working on his rubbings, his own life and career had become new thresholds of externality to confront and interpret.

If Morrison’s rubbings are a return to collage, return does not imply the resolution or even the stable relation of the two practices. Returning to the problem of landscape, to the catastrophic binary of subject and resource, and to the inexorable fact of his own career and life having nearly passed, Morrison intensified the thresholds of externality that the wood collages suggest. Rubbing the wood fragments under paper charges and proliferates those already latent externalities. The surface of the wood, against crayon or charcoal, pressure and paper, deepens the contrast of the grain lines, nearly to the point of producing a grid or a profusion of grids. The gaps, which in the collages are spaces for suspension, saturate and multiply. They invade and open the wood itself, exposing weaknesses, knots, and the places where the wood had been driven with nails. In so doing, the dispersion of space through the wood aligns the evidence of physical manipulation with human and material histories barely clinging to memory.

As a compositional practice, rubbing is an intensification of the deconstructive and generative quality of being and writing against that I have considered in each of this book’s chapters. It is a practice of archive‑­ and art‑­making that does not obey colonial mandates for administrable and permanent reproduction, the aggregation of value, or social repression. Another way Morrison described rubbing was “frottage,” a term that Keguro Macharia uses to think about Afro‑diasporic cultural and political archives. For Macharia, frottage is a concept that does not attempt to fill out or redeem fragments or gaps but, rather, transforms them into “grounds for speculation… tak[ing] seriously the work speculation does in enlarging our apprehension of the world and our possibilities for being in the world.”³⁹ Here, frottage as a method for reading and making theory about diaspora is capacious: it attends to “a multiplicity of sense‑apprehensions,” including “the frictions and irritations and translations and mistranslations, the moments when blackness coalesces through pleasure and play and also by resistance to antiblackness.”⁴⁰ “More than simply proximity,” Macharia writes, frottage “is the active and dynamic ways blackness is produced and contested and celebrated and lamented as a shared object.”⁴¹

What I call Indigenous modernism in this book references the practices of living and art‑­making that, like Morrison’s rubbings, expose, chafe, and multiply at the thresholds of colonial order. Where extractive infrastructures redistribute Indigenous life and land, the artists I have considered nurture “grounds for speculation.” Their practices for doing so require proximity with colonial forms that respond to, remake, but cannot withstand—let alone redress—crisis. As such they are practices (like what Macharia and Morrison call “frottage”) that do not retreat from the intensities of experience of living with and through catastrophic change and loss. They are practices that vex and friction the edges of colonial power, that stall or interrupt, and that venture new multiplicities of meaning against the hollow promises of coherence (belonging, peace, immunity, and protection) its infrastructures make.

1. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 125-27.

2. The Grand Portage Band is one of six Ojibwe communities joined together, as a result of the 1934 Indian New Deal, as the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Throughout this book, I will use tribal specific names (Ojibwe/Anishinaabe or Dakota) when possible, and I will use the terms Native or Indigenous interchangeably when referring to multiple or non–tribally specific issues.

3. Rushing and Makholm, Modern Spirit, 43-44.

4. David Martinez tracks and intervenes in the critical debate around both external ascriptions and Morrison’s own relationship to Indigeneity in Martinez, “This Is (Not) Indian Painting,” 25-51.

5. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 135.

6. On the often overlooked history of grassroots Indigenous education in the Twin Cities, see Davis, Survival Schools.

7. See Two Pines Resource Group, “Native American Context Statement.”

8. Founders of General Mills like Cadwallader C. Washburn rose to economic and political prominence as a direct result of trading and deforesting seized Indigenous land, see Kelsey, “C. C. Washburn,” 38–50. Honeywell, a technology and military weapons company, is the most prolific corporate producer of Superfund sites. Center for Public Integrity, “Honeywell International Inc.,” accessed September 29, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20070605190324, http://www.publicintegrity.org/superfund/Company.aspx?act=12976. Prudential made early profits from race-differentiated insurance policies, financializing the legal dispossession of Black life; see Heen, “Ending Jim Crow Life Insurance Rates.”

9. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 142.

10. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 142.

11. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 125, 146

12. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 142.

13. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 146.

14. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 10.

15. Hudson, Half Century of Minneapolis, 36.

16. Larson, White Pine Industry in Minnesota, 56.

17. Bulletin of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 118.

18. Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks, 9; O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting.

19. Barker, “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,” 17.

20. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 US 1 (1831).

21. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 388.

22. Jodi Melamed terms this kind of political investment “liberal multiculturalism”—a logic by which institutions or polities respond to anti-racist and decolonial insurgencies through the “containing and managing of social movements’ deployment of culture by turning it into aesthetics, identity, recognition, and representation.” For Melamed, art is a key site of this political containment and management that depends on stabilizing the racial identity of artists, reinterpreting their work as transparently representative of racialized experience, and redefining the political value of art interpretation as “testify[ing] to… the race-differentiated history and present of the American experience, multiculturally developed” (Represent and Destroy, xix–xx, 36).

23. Lawrence Halprin, the architect of the Nicollet Mall renovation, quotes in Aschman, “Nicollet Mall,” 8.

24. In 2018, 3M settled a lawsuit filed by the state of Minnesota accusing the company of producing cancer-causing perfluorochemicals for $850 million (Minnesota 3M PFC Settlement, https://3msettlement.state.mn.us). Honeywell has been linked to three groundwater-contaminating Superfund sites in the Twin Cities area in addition to a Superfund site on Lake Superior about which it settled a lawsuit brought by the state of Minnesota and other polities, including the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa for $8.2 million (St. Louis River/Duluth Intake Tar Site, https://www.pca.state.mn.us/waste/st-louis-river-interlakeduluth-tar-site).

25. See Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being.”

26. See Fairbanks, Days of Rondo.

27. Gottfriend, Verges, Melo, Vezner, and Rathbun, “After Weekend Violence,” Twin Cities, July 11, 2016, https://www.twincities.com/2016/07/09/amid-racial-strife-hundreds-seek-answers-in-protests-church-service.

28. Derrida, Rogues, 172.

29. Whyte, Caldwell, and Schaefer, “Indigenous Lessons about Sustainability.”

30. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 192.

31. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 168.

32. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 170.

33. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 174-75, 170-71.

34. Derrida, Rogues, 143.

35. Derrida, Rogues, 143, 11.

36. Morrison and Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 192.

37. Derrida, Rogues, 144.

38. Derrida, Rogues, 143.

39. Macharia, Frottage, 14.

40. Macharia, Frottage, 14.

41. Macharia, Frottage, 17.

Excerpts copyright Duke University Press, 2024