Student Blogs | Race, Gender, and Settler Colonial Violence
Asilo (Asylum). Lithograph tarp by J. Leigh Garcia, 2016 Moderator’s note: Andrea Verschuyl (American Indian Studies, UW) presents two stories about how “indigenous peoples have long struggled against narratives that historicize them, marooning them in a distant past” and how one of the “great claim[s] of these discourses is that all Native peoples are dead.” Verschuyl continues: “In death, they are largely conceived of as a noble people whose erasure from the Earth was unfortunate … ” But we are still here; we endure; we are not ghosts of settler colonial and capitalist violence. Verschuyl’s essay goes beyond a mere critique of food “as a medium of insidious and destructive symbolic exchange … used by the state … to demand the deaths of Indigenous peoples asking for a better life. ” She connects the experiences of indigenous transborder travelers avoiding death in the “weaponized landscape” of the Sonoran Desert and the hunger strike initiated in December, 2012 by At...