Contested Sonic Space: Settler Territoriality and Sonographic Visualization at Celilo Falls

Abstract

In this article, I argue that “seeing with sound" is a fraught political process with the potential to both obfuscate and assist Indigenous claims to land. I do so by analyzing the Portland District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ 2007 sonar images of Celilo Falls on the Columbia River. I take up feminist materialist analytics developed by Native American and Indigenous Studies scholarship on cartography and refusal, and place them in conversation with the sonic geographies of Columbia River Indigenous writers. Namely, I use Elizabeth Woody’s poem Waterways Endeavor to Translate Silence from Currents (1994) to investigate how overlapping and conflicting deployments of sonic imaging play a major cultural, political, and material role in the (re)mapping of Celilo Falls. First, I present a theoretical framework that considers the role of what I call sonic knowledges in unsettling colonial visual cartographies. I use archival Army Corps’ maps and critical sonar studies literature to show how the Army Crops’ 2007 riverbed sonograms emerge from a longer context of US settler practices of enclosing land with maps and surveying water with sound. I then turn to a close reading of newspaper articles and state legislation to analyze how the sonograms take on a present political life in ways that repackage ocularcentrism and assuage settler guilt, thus authorizing ongoing US enclosure of Indigenous lands. Yet, I also bring to bear Indigenous sonic knowledges that position imaging processes as potentially antithetical to addressing questions of access to land and self-determination. Through examining newspaper interviews, public testimonies, and Elizabeth Woody’s poem, I elucidate deployments of sonic knowledge that can help us think about what anti-colonial (re)mapping practices demand of contemporary cartographic imaging processes. Attending to sonic knowledges under conditions of settler-ocularcentrism, I suggest, might assist anti-colonial feminist science studies engagements with processes of imag(in)ing Indigenous space.