My Research
My work builds on growing fields of research on the role of science and technology in histories of dispossession and in the ongoing colonization of Indigenous people, and particularly of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people. My scholarship is rooted in Geography, Native American & Indigenous Studies, and Science & Technology Studies. I combine rigorous archival work, careful community commitments, and Indigenous methodologies of oral history and critical analysis, to narrate genealogies of the spatial politics of colonialism and occupation among the Haudenosaunee.
Anchored in Human Geography’s commitment to the spatiality of human interaction, my dissertation, titled "Land, Family, Body: Measurement and the Racial Politics of US Colonialism in Haudenosaunee Country," shows how Euroamerican settler actors in state, educational, medical, and research contexts have engendered dispossessing practices of containment, discipline, and surveillance by deploying “Indianness” as a biologically significant marker of deficiency.
Presently, my postdoctoral work explores notions of consent and refusal in the biomedical context from and Indigenous feminist and Haudenosaunee perspectives, and will construct a critical understanding of the historic conditions of possibility that have given rise to Indigenous data sovereignty initiatives.
My work builds on growing fields of research on the role of science and technology in histories of dispossession and in the ongoing colonization of Indigenous people, and particularly of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people. My scholarship is rooted in Geography, Native American & Indigenous Studies, and Science & Technology Studies. I combine rigorous archival work, careful community commitments, and Indigenous methodologies of oral history and critical analysis, to narrate genealogies of the spatial politics of colonialism and occupation among the Haudenosaunee.
Anchored in Human Geography’s commitment to the spatiality of human interaction, my dissertation, titled "Land, Family, Body: Measurement and the Racial Politics of US Colonialism in Haudenosaunee Country," shows how Euroamerican settler actors in state, educational, medical, and research contexts have engendered dispossessing practices of containment, discipline, and surveillance by deploying “Indianness” as a biologically significant marker of deficiency.
Presently, my postdoctoral work explores notions of consent and refusal in the biomedical context from and Indigenous feminist and Haudenosaunee perspectives, and will construct a critical understanding of the historic conditions of possibility that have given rise to Indigenous data sovereignty initiatives.
Collaboration
Cornell University and Indigenous Dispossession Project Cornell University, it was determined in a 2020 investigative journalism project released through High Country News, was the largest recipient and benefactor of stolen Indigenous lands through the 1862 Morrill Act of any land grant university. A faculty committee and blog was formed by the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP) to investigate and reckon with that legacy. In addition to partaking in the faculty committee, I am working with other Indigenous alumni of Cornell University to analyze what this means historically, and formulate an understanding of what restitution on the part of Cornell may look like, for a debt of lost land that is unpayable. |
Article
Rendering settler sovereign landscapes My article was published (online first) in May 2020 in Environment and Planning D: Society And Space, available here. In it, I take the 2005 City of Sherrill vs. Oneida Indian Nation Supreme Court case as a starting point to discuss how making land into property in post-Revolutionary New York state reconfigured relationships between land and people in space through particular anti-indigenous and racist conceptualizations of place and polities. I use archival material from Thomas Jefferson's work on conceptualizing the Public Land Survey System, and the Holland Land Company archives. I examine how these practices continue to constitute geographies of occupation in upstate New York, and how they are refused. |
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