Ecolonial Holism

Midway through the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, a vast ecocritical survey of American art history organized by the Princeton University Art Museum, visitors come upon an Indigenous model of the “whole earth.”¹ Wa She Shu (Washoe) artist Louisa Keyser (?–1925) wove the globular basket around 1900 from sturdy, tightly coiled willow stems puncuated by delicate, stacked bundles of arrow-like shoots in mud-dyed bracken fern and red bud (fig. 1). Her luminous rows and airy columns contrast with the slashed gullies, torn roots, and smeared iron tailings on the denuded hillside of a nearby painting by Homer Dodge Martin, The Iron Mine, Port Henry, New York (1862; fig 2). One of many episodes featuring Native American artwork throughout Nature’s Nation, the juxtaposition seems to invite a clear-cut moral comparison: the basket, an embodiment of reciprocal relationships between people and plants; the painting, a representation of human violence against the living earth.² The vessel appears to float like a golden planet through a damaged history of art and land.

Keyser’s was a hard-won holism. Her weaving materials were sourced from equally barren hillsides around Carson City, Nevada, as mine shafts and cattle ranches curtailed the abundance of Wa She Shu territory in the wake of the Comstock Lode boom of 1859.³ Her people were forcibly resettled and sought wage labor to avoid starvation. Keyser invented the degikup, a spherical basket with integrated patterns that expand and contract with the coils, while working in the household of Amy and Abe Cohn. The patrons ridiculed her appearance and personality, invented myths about her designs, and controlled the sale of her textiles in exchange for food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.⁴ While the Cohns held that the degikup transmitted a precolonial state of nature, I see an adaptive form that manifested the dynamism of Wa She Shu technologies amid crisis. Painstaking practices of tending, harvesting, soaking, splitting, and coiling roots and stems transformed diminished biotic communities into precarious new wholes. From the organic wreckage of colonialism—the systematic uprooting of people and plants—Keyser rewove what was torn apart. Her innovation entailed reshaping Indigenous ecological relations to the ungrounding of the Americas. Confounding any simple contrast, the vessel in Nature’s Nation embedded and responded to the same extractive processes underway in Martin’s scene.

I have begun to think of certain works of art that hold inharmonious histories together as a form of ecolonial holism. The seemingly paradoxical phrase indicates that an enduring disposition toward Native cultures as earth-sensitive alternatives to the damaging ideologies and practices of Euro-American industrial modernity is inadequate to the challenges of complex crises. “Ecolonial” recognizes the extent to which ecological processes are bound to the “ongoing, cyclical colonialism” described by Kyle Powys Whyte, in which the containment of Indigenous people compounds the damage wrought by extractive industries by limiting their capacity to adapt with the land.⁵ The modifier positions the divisive dynamics intrinsic to the colonial as an irreducible component of the dense relationality implied by the ecological. The subject meanwhile centers the creation of new unities that incorporate and deform the dominant patterns of withdrawal and control. I seek a language of holism that grasps the arrangement of violent and reciprocal relationships between Indigenous, settler, and other-than-human communities as a frictious web, not a traditional dualism.

Thinking with this conjunction has numerous methodological implications; I will suggest only two in the little remaining space. First, in lieu of the episodic recollection of Indigenous knowledge systems by concerned communities amid flashpoints in environmental politics, we may proceed from the recognition that there is no ecology without Indigeneity. Native people and their arts have participated in mutually transformative interchanges not only with material environments but with the development of the natural sciences in Europe and the Americas, as some scholars have shown.⁶ It follows that all ecocritical studies of American art necessarily build on the transcultural foundations of ecological thought. Second, beyond asking how culturally specific environmental knowledge informs Indigenous artwork, we may inquire into how certain objects remake ecological relations under siege, occasioning dynamic and adaptable techniques of survival. Less self-contained than it first appears, Keyser’s traveling degikup is a translator among the violent displacements of Indian Removal, the longing of Americans for wholeness, and the branching discourse of ecology, then and now. In rebalancing discordant relations and stimulating new growth, the vessel strikes me as extraordinary—but not otherwordly.

Cite this article: Jessica L. Horton, “Ecolonial Holism,” Bully Pulpit, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 5, no. 1 (Spring 2019), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.1698.

PDF: Horton, Ecolonial Holism

Notes

About the Author(s): Jessica L. Horton is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware

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