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- Convenors:
-
Char Miller
(Pomona College)
Tamara Polyakova (University of Eastern Finland)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Preston McBride
(Pomona College)
Pey-Yi Chu
Char Miller (Pomona College)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Streams:
- Decolonizing Environmental Pasts
- Location:
- Room 7
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 20 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This roundtable explores settler-colonial knowledge and practices in the United States and Siberia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Long Abstract:
This roundtable explores settler-colonial knowledge and practices in the United States and Siberia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Preston McBride probes the ways that American Indian boarding schools transformed Native North America by restricting Indigenous economies, altering migration patterns, and forcible relocating 250,000 Indigenous children. These schools were carceral and the children, who contracted lethal diseases, died in large numbers. McBride’s transdisciplinary research draws on epidemiology, history and Indigenous studies to expose the settler-colonial logics that led to Native American erasure. Char Miller finds these same logics manifest in botanist William L. Bray’s ambitious biogeographical surveying of Texas between 1897 and 1907. Bray’s cross-disciplinary engagements with biologists, foresters, geologists (even historians!) was revelatory of his generation’s uncritical acceptance of their academic expertise, and in Bray’s case, the settler-colonial initiatives to map, classify, and name species and ecozones to bolster western scientific ways of knowing—and the economic and political control that that knowledge generated. Pey-Yi Chu assesses the role that Soviet permafrost science played in Siberia’s industrialization, which entailed the eastward migration of Slavic workers. By developing solutions for mining and construction, Soviet permafrost scientists facilitated the transformation of frozen earth environments that sustained nomadic pastoralism to landscapes of extraction and urban development. Some permafrost scientists developed ideas about frozen earth that undergirded post-Soviet Russian scientific skepticism about anthropogenic global warming and bolstered ongoing hydrocarbon extraction in Siberia. By exploring the United States and Siberia together, this roundtable engages with cross-cultural and transnational perspectives.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Tuesday 20 August, 2024, -Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores the battlefields of the Russian Civil War not as spaces of military conflict, but as sites where distinct culturally-determined perceptions and practices came into contact, examining the ways in which its different participants experienced and understood cold.
Contribution long abstract:
In 1918, the area of northwestern Russia between the Finnish border and the White Sea became a battlefield of the Russian Civil War, where several different national and ideological groups came together in conflict and alliance. This paper shows that even though physically all participants of this conflict were affected by the cold weather in similar ways, their attitudes toward cold were based on their pre-existing cultural conceptions.
The British soldiers and officers, stationed in northwestern Russia as part of the Allied force, were inscribing themselves into a narrative of British imperial exploration of Arctic and Antarctic, and their presence in Karelia had a meaning beyond immediate political-military objectives. A similar narrative began to appear in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, but during the Russian Civil War the Red Army soldiers did not yet have this mythology to fuel their fighting in North Russia.
The region's native population - a Finno-Ugric people called Karelians, who physically suffered from the climatic extremes as much as the foreign soldiers in the region, were nonetheless used to them, and have developed a more intimate and personal understanding of this phenomenon.
Contribution short abstract:
"Mapping Texas" explores William L. Bray's biogeographical surveys of the Lone Star State (1897-1907) were essential to his settler-colonial commitments to map, classify, and name species and ecozones to secure the economic-political control that this western scientific knowledge generated.
Contribution long abstract:
"Mapping Texas" explores William L. Bray's biogeographical surveys of the Lone Star State (1897-1907) were essential to his settler-colonial commitments to map, classify, and name species and ecozones to secure the economic and political control that this western scientific knowledge generated. This ambitious enterprise dovetailed with his assiduous botanical collecting that expanded the university’s herbarium; and his transdisciplinary engagements with botanists, foresters, and geologists (even historians!). But these collaborations were also revelatory of his generation’s uncritical acceptance of their expertise and utilitarian perspectives. Bray repeatedly asserted in public lectures and professional papers that botany and biology must be of social use and economic value. Yet he was just as clear that there were distinct limits to how nature and its resources could and should be consumed. In a series academic articles and government reports, he decried the rapid extraction of natural resources that devastated crucial ecosystems and imperiled the public’s health and safety. Overgrazing and timber cutting on Texas' Edwards Plateau and the Balcones Escarpment intensified downstream flooding in cities like Austin and San Antonio. Clearcutting in the East Texas pineries, like the suppression of fire in its longleaf pine forests, was altering the capacity of these once-thick stands to regenerate. Bray was the first to call for the establishment of rigorously regulated national or state forests, a radical counter to the state’s unfettered entrepreneurism.
Contribution short abstract:
Transdisciplinary research drawing on epidemiology, history, and Indigenous studies exposes how American Indian boarding schools transformed Native North America by restricting Indigenous economies, altering migration patterns, and forcibly relocating ~250,000 Indigenous children.
Contribution long abstract:
Preston McBride explores how American Indian boarding schools transformed Native North America by restricting Indigenous economies, altering migration patterns, and forcibly relocating approximately 250,000 Indigenous children. These schools were carceral: there, children contracted lethal diseases and died in large numbers. McBride’s transdisciplinary research draws on epidemiology, history, and Indigenous studies to expose the settler-colonial logics that led to Native American erasure and transformation of Indigenous communities.
Contribution short abstract:
How did understandings of permafrost emerge from settler colonial contexts? This paper traces the influence of Russian colonialism, Soviet industrialization, and US military development on the history of permafrost science to illuminate the coloniality of permafrost as a scientific idea.
Contribution long abstract:
My paper forms part of a roundtable exploring settler-colonial knowledge and practices in the United States and Siberia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Preston McBride probes the ways that American Indian boarding schools transformed Native North America by restricting Indigenous economies, altering migration patterns, and forcible relocating 250,000 Indigenous children. These schools were carceral and the children, who contracted lethal diseases, died in large numbers. McBride’s transdisciplinary research draws on epidemiology, history and Indigenous studies to expose the settler-colonial logics that led to Native American erasure. Char Miller finds these same logics manifest in botanist William L. Bray’s ambitious biogeographical surveying of Texas between 1897 and 1907. Bray’s cross-disciplinary engagements with biologists, foresters, geologists (even historians!) was revelatory of his generation’s uncritical acceptance of their academic expertise, and in Bray’s case, the settler-colonial initiatives to map, classify, and name species and ecozones to bolster western scientific ways of knowing—and the economic and political control that that knowledge generated. Pey-Yi Chu assesses the role that Soviet permafrost science played in Siberia’s industrialization, which entailed the eastward migration of Slavic workers. By developing solutions for mining and construction, Soviet permafrost scientists facilitated the transformation of frozen earth environments that sustained nomadic pastoralism to landscapes of extraction and urban development. Some permafrost scientists developed ideas about frozen earth that undergirded post-Soviet Russian scientific skepticism about anthropogenic global warming and bolstered ongoing hydrocarbon extraction in Siberia. By exploring the United States and Siberia together, this roundtable engages with cross-cultural and transnational perspectives.