Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes discourse around the Seneca white deer, a population of leucistic deer that live on a former military ammunitions depot in upstate New York. It argues for attention to the heritable, and necessarily entangled, ecologies that persist in the afterlives of containment.

Paper long abstract

In upstate New York, on land that stored nuclear weapons through the mid-twentieth century, lives the world’s largest known population of leucistic white-tailed deer. This strange, all-white deer's persistence within the former Seneca Army Depot is remarkable, but not accidental. Through settler-colonial dispossession and decades of militarized security, the Depot has long been shaped by its fencing and managed separation from surrounding ecologies. Outside such a bounded setting, gene flow and random mating would make a recessively inherited phenotype like leucism far less likely to be expressed. Within the Depot’s fenced landscape, however, the white deer population grew and flourished, selectively protected by Depot personnel.

Today, local advocates mobilize to "save" the Seneca white deer through ecotourism. But their conservation framing obscures the paradox beneath the deer's fur: these deer have never been "natural," and in fact have always been sustained through their entanglement with human militarization and securitization.

With the deer, I argue that containment is not a single event or static infrastructure, but a durable regime whose parameters continue to organize which forms of life can persist and become valued. Drawing on preliminary analysis of media coverage, tourism materials, and historical documents from the Seneca Depot, I consider the ambivalence of ecological care in the afterlives of containment, treating the deer as a living trace of governing logics that persist across institutional transformations. The Seneca deer thus illuminate how dispossession and enclosure produce not only human governance, but also selective forms of multispecies futurity in damaged landscapes.