Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People

Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action

Kari Marie Norgaard

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813584195, 9780813584201
• eBook ISBN: 9780813584218
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since time before memory, large numbers of salmon have made their way up and down the Klamath River. Indigenous management enabled the ecological abundance that formed the basis of capitalist wealth across North America. These activities on the landscape continue today, although they are often the site of intense political struggle. Not only has the magnitude of Native American genocide been of remarkable little sociological focus, the fact that this genocide has been coupled with a reorganization of the natural world represents a substantial theoretical void. Whereas much attention has (rightfully) focused on the structuring of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, few sociologists have attended to the ongoing process of North American colonialism. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People draws upon nearly two decades of examples and insight from Karuk experiences on the Klamath River to illustrate how the ecological dynamics of settler-colonialism are essential for theorizing gender, race and social power today.

1 • MUTUAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACE AND NATURE ON THE KLAMATH

No country in the world was as well supplied by Nature, with food for man, as California, when first discovered by the Spaniards. Every one of its early visitors has left records to this effect—they all found its hills, valleys and plains filled with elk, deer, hares, rabbits, quail and other animals fit for food; its rivers and lakes swarming with salmon, trout, and other fish, their beds and banks covered with mussels, clams, and other edible mollusca; the rocks on its sea shores crowded with seal and otter; and its forests full of trees and plants, bearing acorns, nuts, seeds and berries.

—Titus Fey Cronise, The Natural Wealth of California¹

Racism is inextricably tied to the theft and appropriation of Indigenous lands in the first world. In fact, its existence in the United States, Canada, Australia, Hawai’i, and New Zealand was dependent on this happening. The dehumanizing impulses of colonization are successfully acted upon because racisms in these countries are predicated on the logic of possession.

—Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015, xiii)

Early non-Native travelers to the mid-Klamath region, including settlers and anthropologists, marveled at the immense abundance of natural resources to which the Karuk people had access. What these observers recognized as “wealth” in the form of abundant food, profound health, intricate cultural activities, and time for relaxation was a direct result of the success of generations of tribal environmental knowledge and management. Over the past century and a half, traditional Karuk land management practices that generated profound ecological abundance in the Klamath Basin have become criminalized and largely replaced with successive extractive waves of removal of gold, fish, and timber as commodities for sale.² Knowledge systems that emphasized relationships, responsibility, and interconnection at multiple scales have been replaced by the atomized worldview of Western science that has in turn led to single-species resource management. Today, in stark contrast to that earlier wealth, Karuk inhabitants along the Klamath River are among the hungriest and—by settler and capitalist reckoning—the poorest people in the region we now call California. The percentage of families living in poverty in Karuk Aboriginal Territory and homelands is nearly three times that of the United States as a whole. At the same time as most Karuk people in the area have become hungrier, the region generated profound wealth for the newly settled, largely white population and for a developing California—wealth that in capitalist terms would eventually elevate California to economic, political, and social prominence on a global scale.

Sociologists understand these kinds of dramatic reversals in economic circumstances and the radical shifts in resources from one group of people to another in terms of the rise of capitalism, institutional racism, and the sociohistorical process of racial formation (HoSang, LaBennett, and Pulido 2012; Omi and Winant 2014; Winant 2004). I begin first with racism. Institutional racism indicates that racial disadvantage is built into the social structures—here directly into the structural development of the state of California. The concept of racial formation details how economic wealth and political resources are moved from one racial group to another through the process of “race making” that has both ideological justifications and material outcomes. Indeed, at the core of the theory of racial formation is the notion not only that “race” is a social construction but also that what we think of as “race” is constructed in order to justify such transfers of wealth. In other words, what it means to be black, white, Asian American, American Indian, and so forth is different in different places and times, but if we study how the content and boundaries of these racial categories have been formed through unique histories, we can understand considerably more about the nature of the world today. Race is an irreducible political construct that is used as an organizing principle for group position and the distribution of “resources,” broadly construed. By examining unique racialized environmental histories, we can begin to see more clearly the imprints of the past events and struggles that continue to structure present-day ideas of race and environmental policy alike.

If the idea of race is merely a social construct developed to justify white power, how has it become so real in the minds of people? Racial formation takes place through a process called racialization—defined by Omi and Winant (2014) as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously unclassified relationship, social practice or group” (13). Race comes to be real in the minds of a community of people through specific activities that the authors call “racial projects.” These racial projects are particular moments when notions of whiteness, blackness, and so forth are made solid through a combination of ideological discourses and institutional actions. These racial projects have been likened to the building blocks of the concept of race (Bonilla-Silva 2012). Thus, racially exclusive immigration laws, changes in the definitions of white on the U.S. Census, or exclusion of black children from schools can all be understood as racial projects—these are specific instances in which the concept of being black, white, Native, and so forth is asserted as real and socially relevant, on one hand, and serves to provide, transfer, or deny material resources, on the other.

In the past thirty years since it was first crafted, the theory of racial formation has become the central and most important explanation for race, racism, and racial outcomes in the discipline of sociology (Sapterstein, Penner, and Light 2013). Yet within this powerfully generative framework, there is a surprising absence of sociological attention to the importance of land or nature as a material and symbolic resource for the process of racial formation (Park and Pellow 2004). By “nature,” I mean both the larger complex of plants, animals, rocks, minerals, and other beyond human entities with whom humans share our world—some of which flow in and out of human bodies, as well as their historically contingent social constructions. Instead, emphasis within recent theory has been on the vitally important but more strictly social aspects of race making that occur through immigration and incarceration policy (Delgado 2012), discourses of colorblind racism (Garcia 2012), affirmative action debates, and other forms of political marginalization (Carbado and Harris 2012). If racial formation is the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are “created, lived out, transformed and destroyed” (Carbado and Harris 2012, 109), then what might we gain by adding in attention to the natural environment as a key part of this process?

This chapter will detail the importance of the natural world for material and symbolic resources in the process of race making. Next, chapter 2 will engage this history together with current examples of land management practices in the Klamath River Basin to further illustrate why we must understand that the state is both racial and colonial. As scholars from Quijano (2000) to Fenelon (2016), Casas (2014), Klopotek (2011), and many more have emphasized, colonialism is the context and raison d’état within which the North American racial formation processes are occurring. Colonialism and racialization continue to operate together in a variety of ways, and as Lakota scholar James Fenelon highlights, the fact that the dominant society still operates in terms of race underscores its continued relevance (2017). Thus I will also use the term racial-colonial formation.

I begin the first chapter with race not to signal that race is any way primary in relation to colonialism or capitalism but rather because the larger public and sociological conversations to date center on race. Yet within sociology, these discussions fail to incorporate the significance of the natural world. Connections between race and colonialism are particularly important to flag because discussions of race and racism that do not incorporate colonialism extend the discourse of Indigenous erasure that itself is a central mechanism of colonialism.³ From this jumping-off point, I then elaborate the need for engaging settler-colonial theory in chapter 2.

While some readers may wonder that I begin with race rather than colonialism, others may question why I have not more centrally emphasized capitalism. This choice too is an artifact of the existing intellectual terrain: this field is essentially better developed. A host of Marxist scholars and environmental sociologists from John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Silvia Federici to David Harvey, John Foran, Jason Moore, and many others have done crucial work in theorizing the role of the environment for the simultaneous production of wealth and inequality. I hope this discussion will extend their efforts to center how much the natural environment matters across additional important themes in our discipline, from the construction of race and gender to the operation of emotions and social power. My understanding of settler-colonialism is congruent with Marxist critiques of capitalism. Indeed, in an interview with Naomi Klein, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson (2017) emphasizes that she cannot “think of a system that is more counter to Nishnaabeg thought than capitalism” (77), and

extraction and assimilation go together. Colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal words are seen as resources. My culture and knowledge is a resource. My body is a resource and my children are a resource because they are the potential to grow, maintain, and uphold the extraction = assimilation system. The act of extraction removes all of the relationships that give whatever is being extracted meaning. Extraction is taking. Actually extracting is stealing—It is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment. That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always extracted the indigenous—extraction of indigenous knowledge, indigenous women, indigenous peoples. (75)

Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard (2014) discusses the relationships between Marxist and Indigenous anticapitalism, noting that Marx developed his understanding of primitive accumulation in colonial contexts and that many of his insights regarding the nature of capitalism are foundational for anticolonial resistance. At the same time, Indigenous scholars have critiqued Marx’s assumption that the colonization of North America was a necessary step and find the notion of controlling the means of production an insufficient response to capitalism. Coulthard states,

The history and experience of dispossession, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the historical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state.… The theory and practice of Indigenous anti-colonialism, including Indigenous anti-capitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in non-dominating and non exploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as “rightless proletarians.” (13)

See Coulthard (2014) as well as Fenelon (2016), Dunbar-Ortiz (2014), and Simpson (2017) for further discussion of the complex relationships between the operation of genocide, racism, capitalism, and colonialism. Theorizing the mutual structures of racism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the natural environment are ongoing themes throughout the book.

In this chapter, I aim to illustrate that “nature” often matters a great deal in the project of race making both because it is the ultimate source of all material wealth and because the notion of “nature” or “the natural” is one of the most potent ideological resources available for making claims about what is “real,” “inevitable,” and “just the way things are.” In making such claims, I draw upon a rich literature across the social sciences that includes work from Donna Haraway (1989, 1991), Val Plumwood (1993), and others who have written about how dualisms between nature and culture structure Western thought; scholars like Charles Mills (1997/2014, 2007), Laura Pulido (2000, 2016), Julie Guthman (2008), Noël Sturgeon (1997, 2009), Jake Kosek (2006), and Moore, Kosek, and Pandian (2003) who examine environmental privilege and how racialized discourses structure environmental and natural resource politics; and theorists in the field of new materialism, such as Stacey Alaimo (2010) and Elizabeth Grosz (2010), who are seeking to reweave conceptual divides between nature and culture back into political theory. Similarly, I write alongside scholars in the humanities like Sarah Wald (2016), who traces the dual constructions of nature and race through discourses of immigration and citizenship in California agriculture; Sarah Jacquette Ray’s (2013) in-depth analysis of exclusion within the environmental movement; Priscilla Ybarra’s (2016) notion of writing the “goodlife”; and Paul Outka (2016), John Claborn (2014), and Kimberly Ruffin’s (2010) important thinking regarding cultural productions of race and nature in relation to blackness. All of these are key contributions to a growing interdisciplinary literature in the vein of what David Pellow (2017) calls “critical environmental justice.” While these scholars and more across the social sciences and humanities have challenged modernist dictates regarding the irrelevance of the natural world and radically reworked early texts, questions of environment in my own discipline are still considered the terrain of the subfield of “environmental sociology,” not woven into theories across the discipline. Indeed, a central theme of this book is that sociologists bring valuable theoretical frameworks to larger interdisciplinary discussions with concepts such as racial-colonial formation, yet at the same time we have undertheorized the role of the natural world in our work. Whil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Mutual Constructions of Race and Nature on the Klamath
• 2. Ecological Dynamics of Settler-Colonialism: Smokey Bear and Fire Suppression as Colonial Violence
• 3. Research as Resistance: Food, Relationships, and the Links between Environmental and Human Health
• 4. Environmental Decline and Changing Gender Practices: What Happens to Karuk Gender Practices When There Are No Fish or Acorns?
• 5. Emotions of Environmental Decline: Karuk Cosmologies, Emotions, and Environmental Justice
• Conclusion: Climate Change as a Strategic Opportunity?
• Methodological Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author