A Forest of Energy: Settler Colonialism, Knowledge Production, and Sugar Maple Kinship in the Menominee Community

Abstract

The Menominee have long tapped into and cocreated energy flows within ecosystems, particularly with maple trees. The United States, however, seized nearly all Menominee land, transforming ecosystems into industrial systems, including for maple sugar. Moreover, thermodynamic ideas of energy rendered more-than-human beings into "the ability to do work." Many Menominees, however, have understood "energy" in the more-than-human world from a grounded, relational perspective, guided by an ethical system of reciprocity and an intellectual tradition of interconnectedness. Energy studies has critically examined how societies and cultures are entangled with energy systems, particularly fossil fuels. More research, however, on settler colonialism's impacts on ecological energies from perspectives beyond thermodynamics would greatly strengthen the field. We therefore make three major arguments. First, American settler colonialism is an act of environmental injustice that violently appropriated vast stores of energy, or wealth, embodied in the Menominee's ancestral lands. Second, the Menominee consistently adapted to and resisted colonization by utilizing their ancestral knowledge systems and interspecies ethical frameworks while appropriating dominant science and technology to further their goals. Finally, sugar maple trees provide a material example from which to incorporate an Indigenous energy theory into the study of settler colonialism.