The work of repair: land,relation,and pedagogy

Abstract

Geographers center space and place in our understanding of power, arguing that relationships to place matter, that space is a result of power relations, and that how we represent the world makes the world. But to what extent do we turn these methods of analysis to understanding our relations to the land beneath our feet? We consider the experience and limits of repair across four sites, approaching land and place-making as political and cultural practices that orient us toward action and building relations. In this plenary lecture, furthering land-as-pedagogy, work on Black place-making and the afterlives of slavery we propose that geographers take up more seriously and more materially, the work of repair. We are bound up in institutions that stole land from Indigenous peoples, benefitted from enslaved peoples, and built a world of knowledge that shored up the logics and tools of empire; moreover, we must grapple with the afterlives of these practices in their extractive relations to people and land both near and far. As geographers, we can and should be pushing for different kinds of partnerships with the Native nations whose land we are on, toward reparations in the form of material redistribution and restructured power structures, and toward better relations with all workers at our institutions as well. We have an uneven responsibility to devote not only words but also resources and labor to understanding what justice and repair might look like in our fieldsites, discipline, and in our home institutions. We discuss examples of this in our work and at our institutions, propose guiding questions, and invite geographers to reflect on how to do the material work of repair.

Introduction

Geographers center space and place in our understanding of power, arguing that relationships to place matter, that space is a result of power relations, and that how we represent the world makes the world. But to what extent do we turn these methods of analysis toward understanding our relations to the land on which we stand?

We’d like to suggest that many of us ought to take space and place more seriously, and that we begin from the land. We can learn from folks like Leanne Simpson, Eve Tuck, and Clyde Woods and others – people who ask us to approach land as pedagogy – to understand land as a set of relations that was never, but has been right now, made property for capitalist extraction. ¹ We can put this in conversation with folks thinking about the work of repair and reparations, the afterlives of slavery and the present of racial capitalism alongside Black livingness, as articulated by scholars like Laura Pulido, Olúfémi Táíwò, Katherine McKittrick, Jovan Scott Lewis, Pavithra Vasudevan, Willie Wright and Adam Bledsoe, Tianna Bruno, and many others. ² White settlers who look like me (Sara) are especially derelict in taking up these questions, leaving the work to everyone else.

In the following article, which emerges from a joint plenary cultural geographies lecture delivered in March 2023 at the AAG Annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, we engage the idea of repair and how it works in our different research sites, works places, and experiences. Although disparate, our contributions to repair are bound by intersecting points: (1) repair is a process and not an endpoint; (2) it orients around temporal imaginaries involving idealizations of the past and the future; (3) it is a deeply contextual project also responsive to local histories; (4) land is a political project as well as source of pedagogy. In these four ways we string together our respective areas of work and research. For Andrew and Tianna, repair is about political and environmental relationships with the land. Both Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation and Port Arthur, about which they write and research respectively, are heavily contaminated sites, but with visions of restoration, what Tianna calls, ‘relational transformation’. Mabel analyzes hydropower development in the Indian Himalaya where anti-dam Indigenous activists are articulating a vision of repair that fortifies ancestral ties to the landscape while challenging a universal imaginary of climate change. Finally, Sara asks what this business of decolonization and repair looks like in the places where we work, like the university setting. Examining the racist history of our institutions points to the fact that we spend much of our productive lives on places that perpetuate disrepair and socially reproduce legacies of white supremacy. Repair flips university hierarchies on their head, with students leading the call for change and the future visioning of the institutions while administrators and state officials are unwilling to change or say the work is too difficult.

In these four sites, we hope to expand the concept’s meaning while also acknowledging the limits of repair, and ask: what is repair in sites of ongoing damage?

The work of repair: Black Mesa

In the heart of the Navajo Nation (Arizona, USA) on a place called Black Mesa lie two abandoned coal mines and decaying industrial equipment. Decades of mining has transformed the landscape, permanently. The mines opened in the early 1970s. They employed hundreds of Diné coal workers, but also contributed to the proliferation of coal dust and cancers in the area. It was not uncommon for a coal worker to develop black lung.

The mines were sold to the Diné people purely as an economic benefit, as something that would catapult the tribe into a modern place to live. The fact that the mine was located on tribal lands meant that Diné workers could participate in a wage labor economy, with little formal training, and make good money. The only thing they had to worry about was their personal health. But we recognize that capitalism and our need for jobs require that we make unhealthy choices all the time. We don’t get enough sleep, drink too much coffee, or expose ourselves unnecessarily to toxins. Obviously, there are clear class dynamics in the kinds of risks we take for employment.

After 50 years of strip mining that entailed large draglines, explosions, hauling trucks, dust, and debris, the mines closed. Coal no longer made economic sense to the utilities that operated largescale power plants that relied on the coal. What economists sometimes euphemistically call ‘externalities’ were broken bodies, broken lands, and shattered prosperity. Why talk about the troubled legacy of coal mines in a talk about repair? I think what happened afterward, how people started to rethink their fate, their relationship to the land, and future possibilities for economic development speak to the work of repair and how it exposes socio-political relationships and the limitedness of restoration, rehabilitation, and other liberal concepts used and legislated in postmining landscapes.

Federal law requires the reclamation of lands used in coal mining. The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Environment, under the Department of Interior, is responsible for the restoration of the two mines on Black Mesa. Peabody Coal maintains continues to employ former coal workers to restore the lands. Trees are replanted, grasses are allowed to grow back. But the earth is still damaged, made unrecognizable from its previous self.

Aesthetically, the land looks completely different. The jagged buttes comprised of ancient geological formations are replaced with artificially unevenness; rolling hills feign a slight resemblance to more temperate environments. In restoration, there is a colonialism – an imposition of an imagination of a landscape. How is repair made possible knowing under these dynamics? How do you bring the mined lands into a naturalness that reflects the surrounding landscape and doesn’t look like alien environments? This is the difference between the concept of repair and other similar, but fundamentally distinct terminology. Restoration, like reparations, might be paying for a past sin whilst ignoring continuous inequality, in this case colonialism.

For more than 30 years, Peabody Coal slurried coal 273 miles from Black Mesa to Laughlin Nevada using Navajo aquifer water. Millions of gallons of water was lost in this process. Literally the only reason for the slurry was to save money on transportation costs. ³ The mine’s main customer, the California utility Southern California Edison, didn’t want to pay for the construction of rail to move the coal. Water made more profits possible. But this water was not infinite. The aquifer took millions of years to fill, but only 30 years to deplete. Although Peabody Coal denies it, some environmental researchers believe the aquifer is permanently damaged. ⁴ To this day, the U.S. government wants to replace Navajo access to more regular surface waters, such as waters from the Colorado River, with rights to access aquifer water from places damaged by decades of coal mining. Not repair, these actions reenforce the damage.

Diné community members, on the other hand, hold the aquifer as a site of repair, as a place that demands a reorientation of our governing practices. Rather than use water to deplete it, a kind of water that is tied to notions of rights in the west, community members and some members of the Navajo tribal government argue that we should repair the aquifers, divert rains in a certain way to feed subsistence agriculture that would also recharge aquifer water. They hope that the springs that dried up during the height of coal slurry will be restored.

Beyond the physical landscape, there were broken bodies. Mine sites are hard and dangerous labor. Mine workers who’ve spent decades working at the mine suffered from injuries occurred years past. People fall from trucks, injure themselves in welding or electrical work, or ultimately develop black lung, an infection of the lungs from overexposure to coal dust. It is not only the mine worker who is exposed to the dangers of coal mining activity. The large trucks generate dust as they haul tons of coal across unpaved roads. The natural winds and climate of the Colorado Plateau blows dust, debris, and toxins into nearby communities. At the peak of coal mine operations, mine workers at least had health insurance. They could go to most hospitals or clinics to deal with injuries accrued on the jobsite. But after their employment expired, they are left with inadequate Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) health services. The health care is piecemeal and mainly used to apply bandages to open wounds, not recover bodies suffering from chronic injuries or illnesses. For that, specialists are required, and specialists are found far from the remote communities where mine work occurred. This is another form of damage, left treated, but unrepaired.

Finally, the Navajo Nation economy is left with little to show after the closure of the coal mines. Coal once accounted for almost 25% of non-federal revenues, money that is not limited to certain functions, like the maintaining of police on the reservation, but money the tribe chooses to spend on its own, like on jobs for services, scholarships, or small-scale infrastructure. This discretionary funding has collapsed, and tribal services are left as barebone functions. No new monies are coming in, and without economic repair, the tribe is left to search for replacement revenues in the form of new extractivist projects. Today, the tribe is exploring helium or possibly the renewal of uranium mining if no other kind of work becomes available. These new kinds of mining activities are extremely controversial. Already, grassroot groups are organizing against them. There is a loose coalition challenging helium mining. Uranium still maintains a sordid legacy across the reservation, and it is fair to suppose that most tribal members would not want to allow uranium extraction on the reservation. But the outside pressures are great. How do you repair an extractivist economy? Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that contains money for energy transition for communities impacted by the closure of coal. Are these monies adequate? Are they finite? Will it be a singular infusion of cash and that’s it? There’s reason to fear the inadequate, the piecemeal, the bureaucratic, and ultimately the colonial. While bandages are applied to fresh colonial wounds, new ones are made. Colonial inequalities underfund water infrastructure on reservations while also ensuring continued depletions and expanding water use for the cities and communities that are not Native in the seven Colorado River basin states, including Denver.

The work of repair: Port Arthur, Texas

I want to think about the work of repair in terms of my field site, which is Port Arthur, Texas. Port Arthur is the location of the largest oil refinery in North America, the Motiva Refinery owned by Saudi Aramco. ⁵ This community has long been a poster child for environmental injustices common across the U.S. Gulf Coast. ⁶ More than a major site of pollution, however, Port Arthur’s gulf coast location means that it has frequently faced powerful hurricanes. In fact, it was the location of the third landfall of Hurricane Harvey. ⁷ Port Arthur received the highest amount of rainfall of all the impacted regions in this unprecedented event. One of the two historically Black communities in Port Arthur, Vista Village/ El Vista, faced the worst flooding in all of the southeast Texas region.

In terms of ecological repair, there is a need for environmental remediation and climate redress. For Port Arthur, this would look like pollution prevention, regulatory enforcement, and a major storm infrastructure overhaul. ⁸ City officials told me that much of the infrastructure, particularly on the historically Black sides of town, is about 100 years old. ⁹

However, in interviews and oral histories with environmental justice (EJ) and community activists, elected officials, and community members collaborative collected over the past eight years, it is apparent that environmental remediation repair is very insufficient. First, some folks expressed concern that environmental remediation could make way for further displacement of the Black community, particularly because this is a coastal community. They suggested that this eco-gentrification would exacerbate the present process of displacement driven in part by environmental degradation. For example, multiple participants explained that community members are being bought out of the historically Black side of town to build a green belt or buffer between the refineries and the further east areas of town. This is slowly annihilating Black place and a landscape that stands as an archive of Black life in Port Arthur or place as memory. This is, indeed, repair in a settler colonial, racial capitalist state. That is to say, this represents the ethics of repair shaped by settler colonial and racial capitalist logics and values, which perpetuates harm even in the name of repair.

One interviewee responded that remediation must occur, but so must recompense. ‘Stop the pollution, stop the killing because that’s what they are doing. . .Then when we stop the pollution, we’ve got to look at environmental recompense. . .So who is going to repay us for what we have endured for over 120 years?’; the oil and gas industry has operated beside this area for over 120 years. The activist went on to state that grants and projects that are possible through current state and federal environmental justice funding is ‘just a drop in the bucket of what is needed. . .but it’s a start’.

While remediation was imperative, it was not the key aspect that came up when I asked folks about what they would like to see happen with Port Arthur in the years to come. Their response more often focused on the economy, stressing the economic contradiction of many EJ communities. These spaces are major sources of wealth, yet also harbor major pockets of poverty and abandonment. In interviews, most participants discussed what they wanted on the Westside, the historically Black side of town, divided by train tracks that have long hauled petroleum products in and out of these refineries and former extraction sites. Many of the oral histories I’ve collected talk about a once self-sufficient Westside that even thrived in times of segregation and racial violence. My interviewees lament landscapes of grassed over empty lots and dis-repair that now span the Westside. When I asked what folks would like to see of Port Arthur in 20 years, many said they wanted the Westside to be revitalized and for the Black community to retake homes and space and to rebuild the community that once thrived in self-sufficiency.

Often when I present on these intergenerational connections to place, I am asked something to the effect: ‘could this just be a nostalgia for times that once were?’ The answer is, perhaps in some ways, yes. Although, when I have conducted these interviews with different generations including many young people, the summation of simplistic nostalgia misses the key aspect of these responses. People are saying that they want their social fabric and social relations repaired and the economic stability and organizing power that comes with it. Within the community, they want to grow coalitions and solidarity. Unity is the term they used. Moreover, they want to repair place-relations so that future generations can know a life within repair. That is social, place, and land relations. Overall, for the community members and officials, what they argue for is a Port Arthur in a social, economic, and environmental state that attends to and uplifts Black life.

When it comes to environmental remediation, there is a concern that ecological repair is incommensurable with Black connections to place and environment. However, it is not that ecological repair is the problem. It is the racial capitalist social relations ¹⁰ that leaves Black places sacrificed in the name of environmental degradation and remediation. ¹¹ Work on reparative justice in environmental justice communities must incorporate and attend to various threads and scales of repair, not abandoning an ecological discussion of repair, restoration, and remediation, but also knowing that, perhaps, there is no Black ecological repair without relational transformation.

Yet, I do not want to end here with a picture painted of an economically abandoned community longing for repair and recompense. Remediation and recompense are certainly needed, and owed. However, I want to think about the temporality of repair and living in the meanwhile of repair. If repair of land and relations looks like abolition and decolonization, we know new world building will encompass many temporalities. ¹² Each Port Arthur resident I spoke with had impressive faith in a better Port Arthur, one they may or may not live to see, but also speak as if they know it’s coming.

Tina Campt’s mode of describing the relationship between refusal and Black futurity helps me to understand how this insistence on Black futures takes place in EJ communities, an aspect often left out of EJ scholarship. ¹³ Campt suggests that refusals in this context of the Black diaspora are quotidian ways of acting for Black futurity, which means understanding the likelihood of one’s own premature demise, yet ‘maintaining an active commitment to the very labor of creating an alternative future’. ¹⁴ Black EJ communities, particularly in the U.S. South, have persisted, even while living in seemingly uninhabitable environments. It is true that racial capitalism has relegated these communities to sacrifice zones and left community members with little resources for major socioeconomic alternatives; there is little other option than to stay. But is it also possible, in some cases, that folks refuse to be dispossessed from their land, place, and community? They refuse to have their connections to place and the possibility for future generations to share those connections dispossessed.

This more nuanced approach highlights the complexity of navigating, negotiating, and insisting on Black life in this meanwhile of repair, or as Curley, writes in Carbon Sovereignty, ‘how survival is made possible’. ¹⁵ Existing and surviving in this social and biophysical afterlife of slavery ¹⁶ and the many shapes of colonialism ¹⁷ necessitates nuanced refusals, refusals which are framed in lineage of the term in both Black and Indigenous geographies. That is refusal as a ‘resounding affirmations of alternative relationalities’. ¹⁸ This reality also calls for refusals that also ‘maintain an active commitment to the labor of creating an alternative future, even while acknowledging the likelihood of one’s own premature demise’, in ways that ‘persistently tend toward freedom’. ¹⁹ It is this weaving together of insisting on freedom, liberation, and decolonization that is the work of repair.

The work of repair: Dzongu, Sikkim, India

In India's Eastern Himalayan region, a profound landscape transformation is underway. Massive hydropower projects have stilled river waters while tunneling for railway lines and dam infrastructure has left behind scarred, crumbling hillsides. In geological terms, the Himalayan mountains are considered ‘young’, still on the move, as the Indian tectonic plate slowly slips under the Eurasian plate causing the Himalayas to rise continually. This geological context means this is a seismically active, landslide-prone region that also receives the bulk of monsoonal rains, making it a challenging landscape for any major infrastructural development. However, since the area borders China, infrastructural development is crucial to fortifying national borders and providing easier access to the Indian military forces. In places like Sikkim, a state in the Eastern Himalaya and the focus of my research, state officials have welcomed these projects for their potential to generate revenue and aid private capital flow. But it has also led to local anxieties over land dispossession, environmental hazards, and the desecration of sacred sites and ancestral lands.

Hydropower, beyond the nation-building impetus, is a powerful force driving these developments. Hydropower, framed as renewable energy and sustainable development, allows the Indian state to fulfill its international obligations for combatting greenhouse gas emissions. In this institutional and universalized framework of climate change interventions, there is no room to consider the particularities of the Himalayan region. When these rivers are dammed, they are unable to deliver rich sediment downstream, including in places like Bangladesh which so desperately rely on it for agriculture and land building. Indian policymakers constantly cite railroad and hydropower projects in mountainous terrains in European countries like Switzerland as models for development, not accounting for the role played by the Himalayan monsoons with rainfall the likes of which a place like Switzerland will never see. Within Sikkim and across Northeast India, hydropower development is still being pushed through even though it has led to land subsidence, drying up of subterranean streams, and disrupted aquatic life and riverine livelihoods. This imagination of climate repair has devalued the lifeworlds of the many people who derive their material and spiritual sustenance from this landscape.

In my research on the anti-dam movement led by the Indigenous Lepchas of Sikkim, I found language in hydropower policy documents describing the landscape as ‘uninhabitable, remote, harsh’. These terms clearly echo racialized, colonial tropes of the region as an uninhabited wasteland, making palatable ecologically destructive infrastructures. These notions of the landscape rang true especially in Dzongu, North Sikkim, a reserve area for the Lepcha community, and the heart of the anti-dam movement.

Due to years of state neglect, Dzongu is behind on all social and economic indicators. It lacks even the most basic public infrastructure such as roads and schools. The social and economic context of underdevelopment compels many Lepcha youth to leave the reserve for higher education and employment. Dzongu’s hilly terrain also makes it a difficult landscape for any large-scale plantation like tea that requires large, rolling meadows. At one time, large cardamom thrived in Dzongu and was one of the most profitable cash crops in all of Sikkim, but in the early 2000s, a soil-borne fungal blight, most likely triggered by climate change, led to a dramatic decline in production. While people do engage in small-scale agriculture, there is no big industry or large-scale agriculture here. Moreover, since Dzongu is a tribal reserve, residents cannot sell their land to outsiders. Therefore, when the state made an exception for hydropower developers to purchase reserve land, many reserve members seized the opportunity to liquefy what was seen as an unprofitable asset. In opposition to the state’s proposed plans for dam construction and the sale of reserve land by some reserve residents, a few Lepcha youth led a hunger strike that launched the anti-dam movement in 2007. This movement slowly grew, and, in 2010, with the help of national and international activist groups, Lepcha activists were able to stop all proposed projects within Dzongu.

Dawa Lepcha, one of the activists who initiated a hunger-strike, told me how in the early days of the movement, he and a group of young activists, some barely out of school, traveled from village to village in the reserve trying to convince people not to sell their lands. Lepchas follow a hybrid religion that draws on Tibetan Buddhism and Lepcha faith and trace their social origins and the birth of lineage ancestors to specific sites such as the five peaks of Kanchenjunga, surrounding mountains, lakes, caves, and hillsides. Through these tours, many Lepcha youth who left the reserve at a young age later learned about sacred sites and the stories behind them. Dawa explained, ‘Many of the young boys and girls, they don’t know much about Dzongu, they know there is Dzongu, but they don’t know from which point (it begins and ends), they don’t know the shape of Dzongu, and of course how many rivers, what are the stories related to these rivers, or the lakes and the mountains. . .Many were not aware but with this movement, young people have learned these stories. . .The first Lepchas came from Dzongu, the first Lepcha graveyards are here, the first Lepcha marriage all of this is here in Dzongu’. What Dawa is describing here resonates nicely with Simpson’s ‘land as pedagogy’ both as ‘process and context’ that envisions Indigenous people developing a familiarity and intimacy with their homelands that counters settler colonial notions of land as property and commodity. ²⁰

Despite the state’s insistence that Dzongu is a degraded and difficult land, Dawa and the other anti-dam activists envision a future for themselves in the reserve where they can be self-sufficient through a combination of new and old livelihoods and develop a deeper relation with their ancestral lands through the revitalization of Lepcha language, music, and ritual customs. For them, Dzongu is a site of repair. Today, there are many efforts to document the tribe’s oral history and map important sacred sites, especially due to the ever-present threat of hydropower development. Like the Lepchas, there are many tribes in Northeast India that read their social history in the surrounding landscape. Longkumer explains how ‘place-worlds describe events and provide certain descriptions, such as those of a hill, a cliff’s edge, a fallen tree, a living stone, as mnemonic devices that help revive memories and represent them’. ²¹ However, he also shows how the Hindu nationalist push for territorial expansion in this part of India operates by co-opting Indigenous oral histories, mythologies, sacred landscapes, and placenames as vernacular expressions of the larger Hindu Vedic cosmology. This process ‘undermines the historical reality of Indigenous peoples with their own luxuriant tapestry of places-names, cultural distinctiveness, and political sovereignty, girded to their lands’. ²²

To understand what the work of repair looks like in so-called postcolonial contexts, it is crucial we account for how formerly colonized nations like India operate as a colonizing force among its Indigenous communities. Much like settler colonial powers imagined Indigenous lands as wastelands or underutilized resources, the Indian state views Himalayan rivers and mountains as national property, as a resource, ignoring the social histories of generations of Indigenous communities who call this ‘uninhabitable’ landscape home. Huatse Gyal observes a similar tendency in Chinese state policies and scientific publications describing the Tibetan Plateau using terms like ‘fragile ecology’, and ‘harsh environment’, which leads him to ask: ‘are there any conceptual equivalents of these terms in the languages of the Tibetan Plateau’s original inhabitants: its indigenous pastoralists and farmers?’ ²³ The discursive power of the Indian and Chinese states to categorize Himalayan and Tibetan landscapes as uninhabitable or harsh offers important insights into the colonial-racial domination structuring the relationship between these states and their Indigenous populations. At the same time, Huatse’s question pushes us to explore Indigenous conceptions of the landscape, inviting us to attend to alternative encounters with history and geology in the region. For the Lepchas, this belief sustains them that the tribe is ‘eternally blessed’ by Sikkim’s patron saint, Guru Rimpoche and that kingdoms and nations might come and go, but the tribe will outlast them all.

The work of repair: The University

Last year, I was asked to teach our department’s global environmental justice course – a course I had not been part of developing. I found myself compelled and mystified by the title. Was there a global and a local environmental justice? The class gave me an opportunity to move on something that had been brewing in me since 2020 when the High Country News ‘Land-grab universities’ report came out, and since Andrew and I had quoted Diné geographer Majerle Lister in a short editorial. ²⁴ Majerle had said: ‘when I am reading white academics writing about decolonization. . .I rarely see them write anything close to “give them the land back”’. ²⁵ Ever since, I had been wondering: why aren’t we talking about this – why isn’t everyone talking about it, all the time? In fact, if folks talk about decolonizing the university, returning the land the university sits on is actually the one thing that you can almost count on not coming up.

Recently, I took a group of undergraduate students to the Wilson Library Archives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) as part of work I am doing with Danielle Purifoy, Danielle Hiraldo, Sarah Carrier, Rosemary Gay, Mikayah Locklear, and others at UNC. In fall we had started what we are aspirationally calling the Landback Abolition Project. ²⁶

I asked the students to think about what they could learn from the land that UNC occupies and how it is articulated into the global workings of racial capitalism. ²⁷ Not only how did UNC benefit from legal violence committed in the past – the dispossession of Native people from their land, the enslavement of people from Africa – and not only how was our endowment still flush from those crimes, but how, as Tianna puts it in her Annals article, do those logics of antiblackness still structure our relations to that land, and how has the infrastructure of the university itself acted as, as Andrew puts it, a colonial beachhead, ²⁸ structuring relations between Native and settler into the future.

Why hasn’t our geography department (all geography departments!) done the labor of understanding our entanglement in these histories, presents, and futures? Can we turn the extractive university inside out, and set our students and ourselves toward doing the work of repair in service to those to whom we are in debt?

When we went to Wilson library for the first time, thanks to the work of archivist Sarah Carrier, who helped put these pieces together, we looked at hand drawn maps of the land that UNC now stands on. Sarah Carrier points the students to research put together by Nick Graham that lists the ten original donors of land. He writes: ‘Many of the last names are familiar from streets and buildings in and around Chapel Hill. . .’ and lists these names:

• • John Hogan, 200 acres

• • Benjamin Yeargin, 51 acres

• • Matthew McCauley, 150 acres

• • Christopher Barbee, 221 acres

• • Edmund Jones, 200 acres

• • Mark Morgan, 107 acres

• • Jonathan Daniel, 107 acres

• • Hardy Morgan, 125 acres

• • William McCauley, 100 acres ²⁹

I am always drawn to the table Sarah puts together with maps: showing the date that this land was made into property, thinking how this is connected to the revolutionary war. These white settler enslavers were mostly gifted this land as payment for services or items lent during the war. I think about the structure of the US government and the state as being made, at each step, only as part of the theft of land and as part of enslavement.

On the first day of class when I ask the predominantly white and settler students whose land they are on, most of them stare blankly. A few guess Cherokee I do not blame them, because UNC, as of this writing, still does not have an agreed upon land acknowledgment. The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi nation claims the land that the university now occupies, and the Coharie, Haliwa-Saponi, and other nations also have ties to the land here. ³⁰

The Tuscarora also lived in North Carolina before they were driven north. Sarah Carrier brings out a petition, described as follows in the archival aid,

1766: petition concerning a dispute over and sale of land between the Tuscarora people and the Lord Proprietors Deputies of North Carolina. The petition provides a history of the terms and violations of the 1714 treaty and 1748 act, seeks a partial nullification of the 1748 act, and requests compensation through the sale of Tuscarora land to assist with their relocation due to impoverished conditions to a northern area of land (near Mohawk land), which had been held and occupied by Tuscarora for fifty years. Robert Jones the Attorney General, William Williams of Halifax, and Thomas Pugh of Bertie County were identified as trustees in the sale of the land, and in compensation would each receive a parcel of land from the Tuscarora. ³¹

The first two times I brought my class to the archive, I failed to realize that this petition had been in the hands of William Saunders: the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader for whom the building I work in was named. Since I started teaching, I have been asking students on the first day of class if they know the name Saunders. Now I also ask them whose land the building sits on.

Looking at these pieces of paper: let’s reflect. I work in a building named for a KKK leader, who had meticulously collected the documentation of histories of dispossession and cultivated a white history of Native lands made profitable through Black labor, whose role as a white supremacist was deemed ‘hard to prove’, until student activists brought out the meeting minutes from the archive that list his KKK leadership as an honor. ³² I would put forward that for me to work in this building for years, and not know this history, not know the entanglement of Native dispossession and vicious antiblackness, not to push the university for repair and turn my labor to repair, and claim to teach ‘political geography’, is grotesque and a malpractice.

As a white settler, I had never been raised or trained to ask these questions. My friend and colleague, Osage scholar Jean Dennison, had me read Tuck and Yang’s ‘decolonization is not a metaphor,’ which insists that decolonization must be focused on the material return of land, on sovereignty, and who also insist that decolonization and abolition are irrevocably linked. ³³ On reading, I remember thinking: what now? What is my assignment having read this? By then, the landscape and its memories was being activated, charged, made un-ignorable, through the labor and grace of student activists. Students were on the steps of our building: they were teaching us who Saunders was. Sometimes they were reading poetry, but one day they also put nooses around their necks and chanted, ‘this is what Saunders would do to me’ – a moment I cannot forget. ³⁴

What I’d like to propose is that however we are situated, we go home to our institutions, and we consider, not a land acknowledgment, but repair, restoration, redistribution. That we take whatever resources are at our disposal: class assignments, service work, writing, and we reorient them in the direction of repair, reparations, return. This work is contextual, specific, and grounded.

I don’t have the answers to what repair could be. And this work also reverberates with the questions above as to when and how repair itself becomes damage. But, I think we should all be having conversations about what it might look like. At UNC, Danielle Purifoy and I have been experimenting. We have been reaching out to the American Indian Center, the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, and the Asian American Center, adjusting the project to suit their needs, and trying to both take up university money and resources where we can get it to start doing the research on this history that can be used to advocate for material repair. Our goal is to make all research public facing and available to affected parties, to reach out to Native Nations, descendants of people enslaved by the institution or dispossessed by its policies and practices, and to solicit research questions from them that students can then take up. Maybe most importantly, as Danielle has observed, this work starts from asking those who have been harmed what repair might look like.

In spring, I took the third class that has participated in this project to the archives, where we looked at some of the papers of the Patterson family. The Patterson family acquired Native land near the university after Tuscarora and other peoples had been dislocated, and then took and sold Cherokee land from Western NC, on behalf of UNC. A recent article in Scalawag points out that without this dispossession and then selling of land, UNC would have gone broke in the 19th century. ³⁵

The Pattersons were settler enslavers and industrialists, sons who married the daughters of other settler enslavers and industrialists. Tracing their family tree we find an embodied, generational consolidation of whiteness as property through the machinery of racial capitalism that relies on a toxic alchemy of Indigenous dispossession and enslavement. ³⁶ Samuel Finley Patterson was a settler enslaver, cotton factory owner, and politician who chartered the North Carolina Railroad; he was also a UNC trustee. His son, Rufus Lenoir Patterson, was born on the Palmyra plantation, and became a businessman in textiles and tobacco, and also director of railroads. He was also a UNC trustee, and one of his 11 children, Andrew Henry Patterson, became a professor and dean at UNC. Families like this are the architects of institutions such as UNC. They demonstrate both the intertwined nature of slavery and the dispossession of Indigenous people and the shapeshifting ³⁷ nature of colonialism and white supremacy.

At Wilson Library, Sarah Carrier directs students to look at a ledger kept by Samuel Finley Patterson, in which he lists records of Cherokee land taken and sold to go into the coffers of the university. Sarah also brought out, on a different table, postcards, including a famous one of the unveiling and dedication of ‘Silent Sam’, the anonymous soldier confederate monument that was erected in 1913 to territorialize white supremacy onto the center of town and the gateway to campus at a time when the possibility of a different future was in play. A slew of white people surround the statue, where Julian Carr infamously gave a grotesquely violent speech about whipping a Black woman. ³⁸ The white women are all in white dresses. Sarah calls me over and tells me she had never read the back of the postcard, though she had handled it many times. The back reads:

My dear Mother, This is a photo of the unveiling of our new monument to those who left the Univ. to enlist in the army in 1861. The parade yesterday was a fine one, & Mary & the others looked very picturesque in your dresses. We’ll take good care of them & thank you for them. All well. Love to all. Affectionately, Drew. ³⁹

That the descendant of Samuel Finley Patterson, a settler-enslaver central to the theft of Cherokee land, attended the unveiling of ‘Silent Sam’ is, of course, not surprising. But at the same time, tracing the ways that this family’s connections to investments in railroads that needed land, through to their celebration of whiteness in their presence at the unveiling of Silent Sam, in which Drew Patterson is writing to his mom how beautiful the girls looked in their white dresses underlines the structures of white supremacy that built the flagship educational institution in North Carolina. It also speaks to a white-washing or laundering of violence into the innocence and virtue of education. There’s an intergenerational white consolidation of wealth and power into land and property that is made possible only through dispossession and enslavement. White supremacy is central to this story and a celebrated part of it.

We can and should be pushing for different kinds of partnerships with the Native nations whose land we are on, toward reparations in the form of material redistribution and restructured power structures, and toward better relations with other workers at our institutions as well. In our meetings as part of the Landback Abolition Project we are asking community members: what would repair look like here?

What is repairable in all this?

Some things cannot be repaired. But that’s no excuse for inaction. That’s no excuse to wash our hands and go about our business. Because the days when we just go about our business without engaging the work of repair, those are the days we build the structures of white supremacy, colonial capitalism, patriarchy, and other violences into the future. Andrew writes about colonial infrastructure as a beachhead. A dam or canal can be a temporal infrastructure; it can make a river into an abstraction and then, in the diversion of that water toward agriculture, toward coal, it can naturalize, it can deepen and deepen the unevenness of development, working to maintain structures of white settler capitalism through that deepening. ⁴⁰ Pallavi Gupta makes a parallel point on the ways that the distribution of maintenance labor in the Indian Railway keeps caste structures intact. ⁴¹ As Abdoumalique Simone tells us: sometimes people are infrastructure. ⁴² That includes all of us here in this room, not uniformly, but in our varied and differing positions in relation to structures of labor, knowledge, power, and land, land, land.

Ganguly tells us that repair is ‘necessary yet impossible’, and that ‘the irreparable haunts all politics of reparation’. ⁴³ The unevenness of the meaning of repair comes through in Ganguly’s reminder that high design repair might share little in common with the ordinary repair driven by scarcity. We see this in the landscapes repaired into alien places described by Andrew, Tianna, and Mabel, and in the skepticism of community members about whether an institution founded in dispossession, theft, and enslavement, can be repaired. Repair cannot be forced – there can be a toxicity to the drive to repair. There is a ‘risk that a normative prescription of “good feelings” may work to exclude those for whom such good feelings might not be possible or desirable, and cause scholars to devalue or dismiss the generativeness of “bad” feelings’. ⁴⁴ We also have to ask how we can seek to repair when colonial violence is not located in the past but is ongoing. In Andrew’s words, ‘While bandages are applied to fresh colonial wounds, new ones are made’. ⁴⁵ This violence is not located in the past but is ongoing. We also must acknowledge that some futures were foreclosed by the opening of mines, by the installation of oil refineries and hydropower, by the generational losses of life in the dispossession of land and the theft of life in slavery.

Existing legal structures and moral frameworks are inadequate to deal with repair as intergenerational damage, all the more so because historical violence was not against the law; it was law, and because of how this damage is not confined to the past but is persistent and ongoing. ⁴⁶

The four of us come together in this writing because of years of interwoven conversations in which we are trying to understand our relationships to our research, one another, and to the places that we care for and are accountable to. These places – the Navajo Nation, Port Arthur Texas, the Indian Himalaya, and the US South, are profoundly entangled. In their work together (and individually) in the Indian Himalaya (Sikkim and Ladakh), Mabel and Sara find that traces of colonial racial science and anthropological temporal trickery continue to pervade political, cultural, and affective life in the ways that people come to understand who they are in relation to their places, even as more fluid and more than human relations to place also persist. While Andrew’s research is deeply rooted in the Navajo Nation, he was at UNC for several years during the height of contestation over the racialized landscape. Conversations between Andrew and Sara in that time fundamentally inspired and shaped the Landback Abolition Project above, particularly in the ways that it seeks to hold both abolition and decolonization in view. Tianna’s work in Port Arthur provides complex temporalities of both environmental damage and harm, but also nostalgia, desire, and life in the meanwhile and the afterlife of slavery. These temporal nuances and complexities can, in turn, shape the lenses through which Mabel and Andrew engage with landscapes of extraction and energy in places that are both distant and bound together.

We have an uneven responsibility to devote not only words but also resources and labor to understanding what justice and repair might look like in our fieldsites, our discipline, and in our home institutions. In this conversation, we hope to generate methods and aspirations for considering repair through deeply place-based approaches that do not elide or obscure the entanglements and intimacies that are made by colonial encounter, but also do not concede to their logics and languages. We want to attend to repair’s impossible temporalities, that is, to find ways to make livable worlds in a broken place while holding in mind the risk of centering history on authentic, pre-colonial imaginaries that continue to place European violence at the center of time. ⁴⁷

Our conversations from our differently located positions emphasize that repair must be structural and relational, that perhaps the question is not ‘repair’, but how do we deal with past and ongoing damage without further alienating people’s relationships to land and one another. If we take a place-based and land-as-pedagogy approach, part of repair is also about acknowledging the centrality of our relations to land, and that we cannot repair ourselves without repairing our relationship to the planet. We also cannot seek to repair the planet while keeping intact the violent colonial structures that shaped our relationship to land and one another.