Meredith Alberta Palmer
(Tuscarora, Six Nations of the Grand River)
Assistant Professor
University at Buffalo
Assistant Professor
University at Buffalo
Weapons of Improvement: Unknowing the Land and Surveying Settler Futures
The logics that underlie projects of Indigenous dispossession have historic through lines that continually invite reinvestment in property, propriety, and nation-states. What is the historic nature of this investment in the Onöndowa’ga:’ (Seneca) lands that University at Buffalo occupies? This talk examines how colonial land survey and property-making in Haudenosaunee territories at the turn of the 18th century relied on unknowing the land, which is a form of knowledge production that aimed at dismembering Indigenous relationalities while constructing settler futures. Drawing from critical Indigenous studies and political ecology, I show how forested lands in what is today called "Western New York" were framed simultaneously as “wilderness” and “waste” yet celebrated for their abundance by colonial speculators, land company agents, and yeoman farmers alike. Through this contradiction, colonial actors rendered Indigenous lands as empty spaces awaiting possession, unknowing long-standing Haudenosaunee social and ecological relationships with trees among other beings, and enacting a slow yet violent containment of Haudenosaunee peoples. The current of this second chapter of my book manuscript traces the violence of land survey and the ongoing geographies of Haudenosaunee refusals that today form overlapping sovereignties.
Meredith Alberta Palmer (Tuscarora, Six Nations of the Grand River) is an Indigenous Geographer and studies how science and technology are co-constituted through colonial power to impinge on Indigenous relationality and wellbeing. Her work is grounded in North America with an emphasis on Haudenosaunee country. Gathering together fields of critical Indigenous and Haudenosaunee studies, human geography, and science and technology studies, she brings grounded analytics of dispossession and creative practices of refusal to the narrations of Indigenous life. Meredith received an MPH (2015) and a PhD (2020) in Geography from UC Berkeley, and completed a postdoc at Cornell University in the Department of Science and Technology Studies and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Indigenous Studies and Geography at the University at Buffalo in Onödowáʼga꞉ (Seneca) territories.