Colonial Theft and Indigenous Resistance in the Kleptocene

At the beginning of every chapter in Cherokee scholar Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories, he states that “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” At the end of every chapter he warns readers: “don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if you had only heard this story, because you’ve heard it now.” In an age of ecological crisis, one of the foremost stories told is that of the Anthropocene, a period that, according to twenty-nine members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), is marked by increased industrial production, a rise in “agricultural chemical” use, and the introduction of radionuclides by the first atomic bomb blasts. Missing from this, though, are the philosophical and material conditions that would allow for the development and acceleration of these destructive technologies. A more honest story about the current epoch names these actions as the result of centuries of violent colonialism and the theft of Native land.

The AWG’s proposal recognizes the beginning of the Anthropocene as the mid-twentieth century, which ignores colonialism’s founding role in our ecological crisis. As a result, popular discourse omits colonialism from discussions of the Anthropocene. Scholars Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (Métis) argue that the Anthropocene should be dated back to the initial settlement of North America, as this date “names the problem of colonialism as responsible for contemporary environmental crisis.” It is necessary to attach a name to this epoch that calls attention to colonialism’s ongoing theft of land, lives (both human and nonhuman), and materials. I propose the Kleptocene as a name for this epoch that allows for a more robust investigation of the settler colonial—and broadly, colonial—practices dependent on this type of theft. In studying such practices, it becomes necessary to recognize, uphold, and make known Indigenous resistance and resurgence to these settler policies throughout history, into the present moment and the future. Whether these efforts present themselves through art—such as Aquinnah Wampanoag artist Elizabeth James-Perry’s Wampum Belt featured above this essay—or as literature, scholarship, science, public initiatives, or a myriad of other endeavors, they are stories of the Kleptocene as well, and they must be told alongside, and be celebrated in place of, the violent colonial policies in large part responsible for contemporary ecological crisis.

The Kleptocene framework calls attention to this theft that colonialism imposed and imposes on Indigenous peoples. It also set in motion increased industrial production, use of agricultural chemicals, and “bomb blasts” that the AWG cites as markers of the Great Acceleration. In one example, the Kleptocene allows for better investigation of our epoch by concentrating on a specific instance of colonialism prior to the AWG’s proposed start date: the settlement of the Northeastern United States. The U.S. State, from its inception, has been predicated on violent, thieving philosophies and practices that have caused catastrophic environmental changes. This is evident in rhetoric from founding figures in the United States, who created and welcomed climate change in early New England colonies through theft of land, lives, and materials. In examining colonial larceny on the Northeast coast of the American continent, a more honest story about the epoch’s violent beginning and the way this theft informs lives today becomes clearer. Ultimately, by engaging with the Kleptocene to examine the colonial roots of ecological change, the processes that structure settler colonial projects and environmental ills alike come into distinct focus.

Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte has argued that these processes have resulted in one key marker of the current epoch—climate change—as it can be seen as “an intensification of environmental change imposed on Indigenous peoples by colonialism.” The epoch’s proposed start date, its name, and popular climate change discourse ignore colonialism’s major role in, broadly, contemporary environmental degradation, and specifically, climate change. If, as Whyte has said, “U.S. settler colonialism can be understood as a system of domination that concerns how one society inflicts burdensome anthropogenic environmental change on another society,” then one example of the Kleptocene’s structure of theft can be seen in early efforts to change the climate in the United States. By focusing specifically on climate change in early New England colonies as an example of environmental degradation caused by colonial theft, welcomed by early settlers, and weaponized against Indigenous peoples, the philosophical, ideological, and material preconditions that would play a key role in contemporary environmental catastrophe are laid bare. The Kleptocene allows for an expanded view of our current epoch, a path toward honest discussion regarding how we find ourselves in the throes of global environmental catastrophe—and, possibly, a way to imagine a future different from the histories of colonial robbery that led to this point through ongoing Indigenous resistance and resurgence efforts.

Theft and Climate Change

In colonial New England, settlers found and ransacked many materials, but they set their sights primarily on timber. They cleared forests in order to establish farms, and they quickly introduced cattle husbandry. While cattle were used for food, agricultural labor, and travel, they were also fattened and shipped back to Europe to provide the new colonies economic stability. Woodland was regularly cleared for cattle grazing and fattening, increasing their value in terms of settler survival and profit. Cattle were not the only life forms commodified in the early colonies, as cleared forest was also shipped to England. These forests would eventually provide alkaline ash to manufacture soap and glass in England, and the ash used was equivalent to “25 million cubic metres of wood per year.” Transporting such materials and lives en masse required faster, sturdier ships. The commercial revolution created and quite literally fueled by colonial material theft sparked maritime construction and played a role in the Industrial Revolution.

In his 1721 treatise The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature, with Religious Improvements, Mather observed that the continent’s winters were “much moderated since the opening and clearing of our woods, and the winds do not blow roughly, as in the days of our fathers, when water, cast up into the air, would commonly be turned into ice before it came to the ground.” The “religious improvement” he mentions in his book’s title, then, is the clearing of forest. This improvement was necessary for the Puritans to lay claim to the land they were in the process of settling, and the warming climate was viewed as the Puritan right to land.

The idea that deforesting the continent would lead to calmer weather and easier living was not confined to Puritan religion. It was also accepted, albeit with some skepticism, by founding fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. In a May 1763 letter, Franklin wrote on the question of American winters becoming milder:

“When a Country is clear’d of Woods, the Sun acts more strongly on the Face of the Earth. It warms the Earth more before Snows fall, and small Snows may often be soon melted by that Warmth. It melts great Snows sooner than they could be melted if they were shaded by the Trees. . . . [W]hether enough of the Country is yet cleared to produce any sensible Effect, may yet be a Question.”

Franklin was aware, or at least believed, that forest clearing in the Americas had an effect on the country’s climate. Jefferson noticed this change as well, remarking in 1781’s Notes on the State of Virginia that “Both heats and colds are become much more moderate . . . Snows are less frequent and less deep. . . . They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance.”  Much like Mather, both Jefferson and Franklin viewed this new climate as an improvement, because it was more familiar for settlers and hospitable for cash crops such as wheat.

This warming climate and “improvement” served a purpose in addition to claiming land and enticing more European settlement. In 1811, Hugh Williamson, a Harvard scholar and U.S. Constitution signee explained that the ever-warming temperatures were evidence that the continent was better served by white hands. He believed that in addition to creating a more pleasurable environment, the changing climate would either kill or force the continent’s original inhabitants to move, ushering in a landscape more suitable for those with “fair skin” rather than “a great forest, inhabited by savages.” Early climate change was not only accepted, but it was viewed as the manifestation of the settlers’ right to the continent.

By casting the Indigenous peoples as “savages” and wielding climate change as a weapon, settlers like Williamson participated in the process of settler colonialism that Donna Haraway calls “making killable.”  Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and C. Ree explain that making killable is a way of “transforming beings into masses that can be produced or destroyed.” In this way, colonial theft and climate change are further linked. This destruction of the nonhuman and displacement and murder of First Peoples to create a seemingly more hospitable world, one more comfortable for those with “a fair skin,” are linked to policies and processes instituted by Europeans from the inception of both settler colonialism on the continent and the United States.

While wholesale change of the continent’s climate was probably not an immediate effect of colonialism, it must be noted that settler deforestation destroyed natural carbon sinks. The cattle they introduced would ultimately produce high levels of methane, now known to warm the earth over twenty times more than carbon dioxide. Further, direct attempts to warm the climate in order to displace and kill Native peoples using the settler colonial structure of genocide clearly show the weaponization of climate change as a tool of settler colonialism.

Refusing the Anthropocene; Resisting the Kleptocene

In light of such violent thievery, Indigenous relations to the nonhuman natural world were thrown into disarray, and this disbalance led to Indigenous resistances to settler practices. Examples abound. In 1836, Pequot religious leader and activist William Apess decried the hypocrisy of a Christian society whose “children have got to killing and mobbing each other.” In 1893, Potawatomi author and activist Simon Pokagon argued against celebrations of Columbus, positing that settlers were no more than “white men who had been discharged from prisons for crimes committed in the Old World,” despite what “records penned by the pale-faced historians” say. Indigenous authors and intellectuals continued this work into the twentieth century, among them Cherokee intellectuals like historian Rachel Caroline Eaton, novelist John Milton Oskison, playwright Rollie Lynn Riggs, and educator Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Mohawk author E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake, Yankton Dakota author and activist Zitkála-Šá, and Salish Kootenai author D’Arcy McNickle.

Jewelry and wampum by Elizabeth James-Perry. Click images to enlarge.

Today, this work continues through the work of artists such as contemporary filmmakers Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee Creek) and Jeff Barnaby (Mi’kmaq); performance collectives like The 1491s and A Tribe Called Red; visual artists like Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota) and Elizabeth James Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag); and so many others I have not listed here. Activist and academic projects that reject settler exceptionalism and claims to stolen land take myriad forms—from Indigenous conservation initiatives like those led by Ron Reed (Karuk) and Jeremiah “Jay” Julius (Lummi), Rebecca Nagle’s (Cherokee) podcast This Land regarding ongoing land theft, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (Mississauga Nishnaabeg) argument for radical place-based resistance through Nishnaabeg ways of knowing such as hunting, fishing, rice-harvesting, storytelling, and tapping maple syrup on settler “owned” land to Lisa Brooks’s (Abenaki) (re)mapping the very land that early colonists on the East Coast sought to steal. These stories of resistance and resurgence are stories of the Kleptocene, and they must be told alongside histories of settler violence, working toward a new epochal future on repatriated land.

In studying the architects of the United States as welcoming a warming climate in the name of settler colonialism, a fuller picture of our current epoch comes into view. It becomes clear that the United States, from its birth, played a key role in causing catastrophic environmental change far before the Anthropocene’s currently proposed start dates. In telling this story, and giving it a more appropriate name that calls explicit attention to the violent theft it is based in, we are better equipped to follow the lead of many Indigenous scholars, activists, and storytellers in order to tell the full, violent story of colonialism and understand the Earth’s current epoch in the context of resistance and resurgence from the past, present, and future. In so doing, those of us who have benefited from such settler colonial violence, and who would continue to benefit from implicating the whole of humanity for such ecological destruction, can no longer say we would have lived our lives differently had we not heard the Kleptocene’s story—we’ve heard it now, and we must continue to tell it.

Featured image: Wampum Belt by Aquinnah Wampanoag artist Elizabeth James-Perry. Photo by artist. Website.

Kyle Keeler is a Ph.D. student in Environmental Sciences, Studies, and Policy, and English at the University of Oregon. He completed an M.A. in Literature at Kent State University in May 2018. His work appears or is forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Early American Literature, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, and Midwest Quarterly. His research examines the settler colonial roots of Earth’s ecological crisis. Contact. Twitter. Website.

Artists featured in this essay include:

Elizabeth James-Perry, contemporary and traditional Native artist, is an enrolled citizen of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head -Aquinnah, located by the richly colored clay cliffs of Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard).  She is also a historical researcher, filmmaker, exhibit consultant, and owner of Original Wampum Art.  In her creative process, Elizabeth focuses on early Northeastern Woodlands cultural arts and diplomacy. The artist employs the rich purple hues of the quahog shell in designing original jewelry, sculpturing whale and bear effigies; and drilling fine beads to weave the luxurious drape of wampum belts.  She revived endangered textile clothing and basketry art forms: traditional yarn hand spinning, plant and mineral dye techniques. Elizabeth cultivates many of the plants used in her dyes and weaving; the rest is wild-harvested in a sustainable way. Among her many Wampanoag tribal community mentors, she includes her mother Patricia James-Perry, a scrimshaw artist, and illustrator; and her cousin’s, the late Dr. Helen Attaquin and Tony Pollard Nanepashemut. Elizabeth continues their work to shore up tradition.As a member of a Nation that has long lived on, and harvested the sea, Elizabeth’s is a perspective that combines coastal Algonquian culture, Native whaling history and marine science in her ways of relating to life on the North Atlantic. The artist holds a degree in Marine Science from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and she served as the Federal Tribal Co-Lead of the Northeastern Ocean Planning Body. Contact. Website.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a New Mexico–based multidisciplinary artist who uses social collaboration in response to timely and site-specific issues. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European descent. Luger produces multi-pronged projects that take many forms—through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, and repurposed materials, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about twenty-first-century Indigeneity. This work provokes diverse audiences to engage with Indigenous peoples and values apart from the lens of colonial social structuring, and often presents a call to action to protect land from capitalist exploits. He combines critical cultural analysis with dedication and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages. Website.