November 18, 2022
The Spectral Afterlife of Paul Bunyan—Settler Colonial Greenwashing of Indigenous Environments in Minnesota
Dr. Deondre Smiles
Assistant Professor, University of Victoria
Abstract
The American legend of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, has underpinned popular folk narratives about the development of the United States, particularly in the Upper Midwest, for over a century. The larger-than-life lumberjack is commemorated across the United States with multitudes of spaces dedicated to honoring him and his ‘role’ in shaping the geographies of frontier America.
However, the legacy of Paul Bunyan has a darker side--it serves to obscure the real-life dispossession and destruction of environments and spaces in which Indigenous peoples have inhabited and have had relationships with dating to before colonization.
Building off of the work done by Nik Nerburn in his ‘zine’ In The Shadow Of Paul Bunyan (2014), this talk briefly traces the history of the legend of Paul Bunyan and places it alongside settler colonial development and environmental degradation, bringing these histories into conversation with awareness (or lack thereof) surrounding historical and contemporaneous Indigenous relationships to land and environment in various American geographies. I build the argument that rather than existing as a folklore of the past, the broader settler colonial logics of extraction that Bunyan represents lives on in destructive ways in Minnesota, and present ways that Indigenous ecological knowledge presents a foil to these logics.
Biosketch
Dr. Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria. His research interests include critical Indigenous geographies, human-environment interactions, cultural resource preservation/protection, and science/technology studies. His current research centers around investigating connections between ‘traditional’ cultural resource management, such as burial grounds/site protection and preservation, and protection of the living environment, including more-than-human kin (animals, plants, water), with a focus on how new political possibilities can be created for all living things, humans, and more-than-human alike, in an era of climate crisis. Deondre is the PI of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory at UVic, a research lab which focuses on geographic solutions to questions of Indigenous resurgence and sovereignty.