In Against Extraction Matt Hooley traces a modern tradition of Ojibwe invention in Minneapolis and St. Paul from the mid-nineteenth century to the present as that tradition emerges in response to the cultural legacies of US colonialism. Hooley shows how Indigenous literary and visual art modernisms challenge the strictures of everyday life and question the ecological, political, and cultural fantasies that make multivalent US colonialism seem inevitable. Hooley analyzes literature and art by Louise Erdrich, William Whipple Warren, David Treuer, George Morrison, and Gerald Vizenor in relation to histories of Indigenous dispossession and occupation, enslavement and Black life, and environmental harm and care. He shows that historical narratives of these cities are intimately bound up with the violence of colonial systems of extraction and that concepts like Indigeneity and sovereignty extend beyond treaty-granted promises of political control. These works, created in opposition and proximity to the extraction of cultural, political, and territorial resources, demonstrate how Indigenous claims to life and land matter to rethinking and unmaking the social and ecological devastations of the colonial world.

Matt Hooley is Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Dartmouth College.

Acknowledgments  vii
Prologue. Collage: Landscape  xi
Introduction. Where Extraction Takes Place  1
1. Cultures of Removal  33
2. Domestic Affects  63
3. The Ruins of Settlement  93
4. The Right to Gather  123
Epilogue. Horizon Lines  155
Notes  165
Bibliography  189
Index  201