And I wanted to respond without derailing the original post:
You’re right. But also. What Holleman was kinda trying to do with
this research, and what I also believe is true, is that US institutions,
corporations, etc., absolutely knew that Indigenous people
maintained the best and most time-tested environmental knowledge of
North America, but settler-colonial institutions were deliberately choosing to ignore it.
On
purpose. Ignoring Indigenous knowledge, purposefully. Ignoring their
own settler-colonial reformists and scientists, purposefully. Certain US agencies and institutions, and their proxies or satellites, clearly knew that ecological crisis was coming, and not only did they passively ignore solutions, they actively worked to make ecological crisis worse.
That’s why Holleman says this [in an October 2016 interview]:
”Contemporary Dust Bowl literature […] frames the disaster […] narrowly as a […] natural event, void of social content.
[…] Prevailing perspectives therefore make invisible the colonial and
racial-domination aspects of the [ecological] crisis and lead to the whitewashing of
Dust Bowl narratives,“
And from her 2017 article: “By the 1930s there was a well-established body of scholarly literature,
government reports, conference proceedings and periodical articles
discussing the growing problem of soil erosion across the colonial
world. These sources not only provide documentation of the scale of the
issue in the absence of consistent data, they also show how this
phenomenon was understood by many at the time as linked to white
territorial and resource acquisition.”
They knew what they were doing.
What
I mean by that is: Another of Holleman’s proposals is that the Dust
Bowl was basically a manifestation of the US’s maneuver to, I guess you
could say, “outsource its approach to Indigenous people,” by using
environmental degradation and ecological crisis as a weapon. A weapon
not just against Indigenous people of Turtle Island, but also on a
global scale against other regions, and a weapon against its own poor
white communities, too. As if the US institutions saw how effectively
ecological damage had neutralized many Indigenous communities’ ability
to resist, and the US was like “nice, now let’s do it to everybody.”
The time period that Holleman is focusing on is 1870 to 1930-ish, corressponding with the US military campaigns against Indigenous peoples of the 1870s and 1880s, culminating in the “end” of the “war” around 1891 (that’s the date claimed in US settler history books). So after imposing this kind of resource extraction and “removing” Indigenous peoples in “the Wild West” of the 1880s, it’s no coincidence that the US then almost immediately entered “the Gilded Age” and engaged in the Spanish-American War (1898), during which it took control of Cuba, Philippines, etc., effectively outsourcing its industrial agriculture and forcing it on new communities in the tropics and especially in Latin America. And it’s also no coincidence that the end of this period, around World War 2, saw the ascension of the US as global superpower. So the tactics that the US used in that time period, the tactics that created the Dust Bowl, are still used by the US today, on a global scale.
Purposefully
ignoring Indigenous environmental knowledge was/is profitable, at least
in the short-term. Through monoculture crops, devegetation and timber
exctraction, expansive cattle rangeland, etc. Those extraction
corporations definitely know that resources are finite. They can cash-in quickly, and bail-out later.
Ignoring Indigenous knowledge of North American landscapes provided, like, some bonus
advantages for the settlers, especially during the 1870-1930 time
period in discussion. US institutions could (1) make a bunch of money
off of industrial-scale resource extraction; (2) they could
simultaneously dispossess Indigenous peoples and weaken their
communities, thereby eliminating a threat to US cultural hegemony; and
(3) when soil degradation and devegetation would ultimately lead to
economic collapse even of white settler communities, then unions and
working class types living in those regions would also be harmed,
thereby neutralizing another threat to US corporate power and allowing
further consolidation of US imperial control.
Like feudalism:
Hit a rural community with environmental damage. Now they don’t grow
food. Next, they’re bankrupt. Debt and bankruptcy anchor people to a
single place. Then they’re forced to Participate in the Game and Follow
The Rules. They can’t run away from a rental debt; if they try to escape
to another side of the country, the banks there still know not to lend
to them or give them an account. They’ll get arrested for shoplifting
some food. And the result - you could argue, the intended result - is
that then people are, essentially, “too poor to get involved in reform,
organizing, agitation, and radicalism.”
Holleman, also from the 2017 article:
“Globalizing the ecological rift involved the racialized division of
nature and labor on a planetary scale as a precondition for the
development of the first global agricultural market and food regime. All
of this shaped farming practices worldwide, including on the US
Southern Plains, as areas were subject to an intensifying ecological
imperialism and brought into the global market under conditions of
unequal ecological exchange.”
In other words, the 1930s Dust Bowl was a local manifestation of the kind of ecological crisis that Euro-American imperial powers were provoking worldwide - in the African Sahel, in the savanna of Brazil, in the palm plantations of Central America, in the sugar cane fields of Philippines - in order to expand monoculture and industrial-scale resource extraction, and in order to consolidate power, to force people to participate in their “market.”
They did it on purpose.
Euro-American settlers knew exactly what they were doing by deliberately
targeting ungulate herds, because eliminating a species like bison not
only removes a primary food source and a symbolic, iconic touchstone
vital to cultural identity, but also results in loss of soil
nutrition and devastation of the wider native prairie/plains ecology.
Sort of like a long-term investment: Degrade the soil, and within a few
years, food is scarce and now the settler-colonial institutions have
leverage. Europe repeated this process in West Africa and the Sahel
during the Scramble for Africa and the early 20th century: Burn woodland in seasonally-dry savanna environments, and eliminate the vast
ungulate herds (buffalo, antelope, etc.) which are vital to maintaining
the healthy soil; then when mass vegetation loss occurs and food resiliency is lost, local
communities are forced to install rubber, palm, and sugar plantations.
Today, burning of forest in the Amazon similarly targets Indigenous communities.
I mean …
[Bison skulls, 1892. Via Detroit Public Library.]
… does this look like an accident?
This image is burned into my mind, and it still fucks me up every time I see it.
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