Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing

Abstract

This book is an investigation of the documents that materialize what Taschereau Mamers terms “settler colonial ways of seeing”—a frame of viewing that makes land and the Indigenous peoples who live there available for state domination and elimination. Specifically, this book analyzes the documents and paperwork that uphold Indian status as defined by the state through the Indian Act in its various iterations, the Indian Register and its registration forms, status cards, and state articulations of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis. This work draws together approaches from media studies, settler colonial studies, and art-led inquiry to parse how such documentation operates as evidence to uphold frames of state seeing and how Indigenous artists work to resist and recast such ways of seeing. It engages questions of visibility to think through how Indigenous peoples are made visible or rendered illegible to state actors, how paperwork reifies and naturalizes these processes, and how one might question these histories and frames of vision. A genealogy of documents and administrative practices, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing is guided by Indigenous art that both critiques these practices and imagines alternative routes for the future that include an understanding of treaty responsibilities, the agency of self-representation, and Indigenous visual sovereignty.