Visiting Scholar Talk: Matt Hooley, “George Morrison: Landscapes Against Extraction”

Sponsored by the George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts, the George Morrison Estate, and the Visiting Artists & Critics Program. Hosted by Department of Art Lecturer Erin Robideaux Gleeson.

Matt Hooley is Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Dartmouth College. Assistant Professor Hooley will be giving a lecture titled “George Morrison: Landscapes Against Extraction.” In his new book, Against Extraction: Indigenous Modernism in the Twin Cities, 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.