Participating in The Land as Other

Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University

 I first met Veronica when I organised a gathering of PhD students (historians, nurses, geographers etc) who were all working on Wales. Her work on Aboriginal languages, Country and indigeneity, set in the context of Wales, drew us together. I am a Latin Americanist, specialising in Argentina, who enjoys working in interdisciplinary ways. I frame my work within global dynamics: colonization, migration, racialization, capitalist expansion and the rise to supremacy of Eurocentric knowledge. I speak Welsh, Spanish and English.

Currently, I work on Welsh Patagonia – Y Wladfa – and the complex interrelationships between the Indigenous Peoples, Welsh, English and ‘Spanish’ in the mid-nineteenth century. The Welsh arrived as settlers in 1865, to escape English oppression and establish an autonomous community where Welsh people could rule themselves in their own language and according to their own customs. However, their anti-colonial strategy entailed colonizing Indigenous land in Patagonia. In Wales, the story is celebrated as a moment of courage, ingenuity and endurance – as it was. Yet the telling of it disavows the impact of Argentine-led settler colonialism in Patagonia: the appropriation of land, the imposition of alien sovereignty, the erasure of languages and knowledges, the shattering of communities. My aim is not to condemn the Welsh settlers, but to make visible both the indigenous story and the coloniality of power.

My work connects to the Tir/Land project in two key ways. Firstly, it is framed by insights from indigenous and settler colonial theories, given that ‘territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.’[1] Secondly, it locates human (and other) life in particular places: this happened here. This chimes well, I think, with the artistic aims and practices of the group.

My research sensibility is guided by a search for complexity: I look for ambiguity and incompleteness, as opposed to binary thinking with its closed certainties. I reach for decolonial methodologies that take seriously other life-ways and knowledges, that emphasise listening and dialogue, and that work towards a reflexive recognition of privilege and responsibility. This scholarship has a clear political agenda which aims to expose and erode injustice, and to promote dignity and pluriversality (not a universal solution).    

I will be collaborating with Veronica’s printmaking by providing Welsh and English language text for her to develop in her piece. I am opening a new phase of my research which explores the concepts and practices of settler colonialism in Wales today. I want to open spaces to unsettle my research practices, and thinking through art is already shaking things up in a productive way. As a settler in Wales I want to reflect on my own subject position but also to search for ideas and practices that might go into a toolkit to help us all understand our relationship to Wales. I have begun thinking through a series of questions:

Where is the land that knows your bones?

I was brought up on a hill farm in Flash, near Buxton (Derbyshire) and that is the land that knows my bones. But living on my husband’s farm (with my Welsh-speaking family), working and making the land, I begin to belong. The everyday practices of being and living and remembering in a particular place matters. For me, indigeneity is about commitment to a place on its terms (not yours).[2] 

What does it mean to own land?

Capitalism understands land to be an exploitable commodity and we are all entangled in its legal and financial regimes. It configures land to be wasted if it is not serving the interests of Man (sic). This conceptualization interpreted Indigenous land as a terra nullius (and Indigenous people as primitive homo nullius) which could be justifiably appropriated (stolen).[3] Such concepts run deep. Farmers are caught in many binds, though, not least of which is the need to support their family in a voracious global food market.    

Where is the loom in your room?

I was reading the chapter on Welsh Plains in Slave Wales, sitting in our mid-eighteenth century farm house.[4] I learned that farmers in mid-Wales would spin and weave their rough sheep’s wool into cloth to supplement their poor income and sell it to merchants in Shrewsbury. They sold it onwards until it was eventually exchanged on the west coast of Africa as payment for kidnapped people, or used later in the Carolinas to clothe plantation slaves. I looked up from the page: ‘where was the loom in my room?’ I wondered. How is my life, my house, this land, implicated in the gross injustices of colonialism and slavery? Settler colonialism (and racial injustice) is ‘a structure, not an event’. [5] While we often choose to ignore its insidious impact but we can (perhaps should) seek out colonialism because it is (nearly) always at work. 

Who knows? Who knows what? Who knows best?

The politics of knowledge is central to decolonial thinking and how we ‘know’ the land has an intimate impact on what we do, what we cherish and what we trash. What constitutes knowledge and how are modes of knowledge (like science, intuition, spirituality, making) set in hierarchies. How do such hierarchies bestow authority, enable powerfulness and disempower certain groups? What is important and what irrelevant? How is this racialised or gendered, in what language is it uttered and what forms of annotation (writing, singing, pictograms) do we load with meaning and which do we dismiss?

How should I work?

How we know what we know – our methodology – can shape our power relationship to the land and to other beings – human and otherwise – who live there. The ‘how’ question of our thinking and research, art practice and printmaking proceeds, then, is of vital importance.

[1] Patrick Wolfe (2006) ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ Journal of Genocide Research 8:4, 387-409, p. 388.

[2] Brian Yazzie Burkhart (2019) ‘Be as strong as the land that made you: an Indigenous philosophy of well-being through the land’ Science, Religion and Culture 6:1, 26-33. 

[3] Jodi Byrd (2011) The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  

[4] Chris Evans (2010) Slave Wales: The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery. Cardiff, University of Wales Press.

[5] Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’, p. 388.