Graffiti and Colonial Unknowing: A Comment on Mishuana Goeman's “Caring for Landscapes of Justice in Perilous Settler Environments”

in "caring for landscapes of justice in Perilous Settler Environments," Dr. Goeman shows how the NDN Collective's initiatives, Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero's Tongvaland project, and the works of Gabrieliño Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame "exemplify communities of care" that work toward "the unmapping of settler terrains" ("Caring for Landscapes" 51). Her address highlights how these cartographic art productions are processes of (re)mapping that challenge colonial spatialities. Drawing on Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's poem "i am graffiti," Goeman frames these art works as Indigenous graffiti, insofar as they are everyday acts of resurgence1 that resist erasure and enact rematriation.My comments aim to articulate how Romero's and Dorame's works both reveal and disrupt a colonial unknowing by showing the cracks of settler colonial spatiality. I take Goeman's address to illustrate that the changing of minds and unsettling of settler identity will not occur through argumentation, facts, and figures alone, but rather through aesthetic and cartographic practices that "provide a way of seeing Indigenous futurities and relationalities" ("Caring for Landscapes" 52).In order to highlight how these art practices enact a kind of (re)mapping that breaks through the veneer of colonial permanence, we first need to consider the way mapping transforms land into property in the service of Indigenous erasure and land dispossession. In her address, Goeman offers a short history of what is now called Los Angeles through the lens of dispossession that occurs through "international claiming of property and burgeoning US property law" ("Caring for Landscapes" 53). Tovaangar was divided into Spanish (and then Mexican) land grants that, after 1846, were "registered under the US as property" (Goeman, "Caring for Landscapes" 53; emphasis added). The Land Act of 1851 "established the domestication of the California landscape under US governance" by legitimating existing Mexican land rights and mapping out territory yet "unclaimed" ("Caring for Landscapes" 54). The mapping of this so-called "unclaimed" territory propelled a violent erasure of California Indians by "establishing new and ongoing commerce centers" ("Caring for Landscapes" 53). Land was transferred into property—as a thing owned—without "the consent of those who . . . lived on the land since time immemorial, following the settler structure of passing land between Christian nations" ("Caring for Landscapes" 53). By showing how property rights legitimate conquest and violence, Goeman illustrates how mapping has been (and continues to be) an "essential settler-colonial tool to domesticate land in Southern California and propel development" ("Caring for Landscapes" 54). While she demonstrates how the mapping of Tovaangar using 493 hand-drawn Diseños maps served to sever Indigenous communities (and their relationships with land, such as the Gabrieliño Tongva with the San Gabriel Mountains), she emphasizes that this is an ongoing process that has not been left in a distant past. Newer maps that may seem more objective and scientific with "better models of scale or a more realist representation" remain, at their core, maps of dispossession ("Caring for Landscapes" 54).The very desire to objectively determine location by assigning latitude and longitude reveals a colonial spatiality, which "territorializes the physical landscape by manufacturing categories and separating land from people" and conceives of space in terms of property logics (Goeman, "ReMapping Indigenous Presence" 296). In addition to Indigenous land dispossession, this colonial spatiality rejects relationality by creating dualist boundaries between human and non-human, in which land is the raw material for human development and the creation of culture. Cherokee philosopher Brian Burkhart speaks of relationality in terms of locality, which he defines as "being-from-the-land, knowing-from-the-land, and meaning-from-the-land" (Indigenizing Philosophy xvii). The severing of locality can be understood in terms of the transformation of land as relative to inert matter to be acted upon. Mapping serves as a tool of settler colonial erasure insofar as it delocalizes "land as the relational ground of kinship" into "land as a mere object that only has meaning or value in relation to people" ("Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land"). For Burkhart, these differing understandings of land lead to divergent conceptions of people: "the idea of people as floating free from the land and the idea of people as fundamentally a part of the land" (Indigenizing Philosophy 6). An understanding of land as object derives from the coloniality of power, which reconfigures land and people as resources to be extracted. The covering over locality is, however, always incomplete.While the mapping of Southern California serves to erase Indigenous presence, and that of the Tongva in particular, Goeman does not frame Romero's Tongvaland project as providing a "truer" mapping of the area. As Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes, the work of history reflects power; truth is not the be-all and end-all (Smith 34). Simply put, Goeman is not convinced that a more accurate map possesses "the power to transform history into justice." Moreover, telling the truth is not enough since people are already aware of the "raw deal, the embezzlement, the genocide, and the so-called lost treaties" (Goeman, "Caring for Landscapes" 51). The problem is not a lack of awareness—it is not a question of challenging falsehoods. Rather, she recognizes that truth alone is insufficient to change, undo, or repair harm and injustice. While the mapping done through venues like native-land.ca can be a starting point to better understand North America (also called Turtle Island), she highlights practices of Indigenous graffiti as a more generative way forward.Indigenous graffiti (and other practices of story mapping)2 are more transformational in challenging colonial spatialities, in part because they can wake spectators from what Vimalassery et al. call a "colonial unknowing," which is an epistemological orientation that "endeavors to render unintelligible the entanglements of racialization and colonization" (Vimalassery et al.). This orientation insists on epistemic mastery that "precludes relational modes of analysis and ways of knowing otherwise" (Vimalassery et al.). Colonial spatialities can come to feel, especially for settlers, commonsensical, normal, natural, and distinctly apolitical. Maps just tell it like it is and reflect objective reality, so the story goes. In my own work, I speak of this unknowing as a kind of structural settler ignorance (drawing on Charles Mills's work on epistemologies of ignorance).3Patrick Wolfe's description of settler colonialism's "logic of elimination" gives us an entry point to consider how settler colonialism functions to eliminate Indigenous peoples (both physically and discursively) (Wolfe 387). In order to assert settler normativity, the settler colonial logic of elimination of Indigenous presence also mandates an invisibility (and ignorance) of settler colonialism. For this reason, settler colonialism, when successful, "effectively covers its tracks" (Veracini 3). Settler ignorance comes to form what Mark Rifkin calls "settler common sense," an affective orientation that forms the background of the settler's everyday experience, in which space is experienced in terms of jurisdiction, occupancy, and ownership.The account of colonial unknowing or settler common sense gives language to the epistemic, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of settler colonial violence. This violence is not limited to violations of treaties and disproportionately high incarceration and child welfare rates, but is also present in everyday feelings, sentiments, and practices of invisibility. The ignorance of settler colonialism forms the affective background that can make colonialism appear permanent and inevitable—thus denying Indigenous relationality and futurity. For this reason, the practices of Indigenous graffiti can do more to challenge a colonial unknowing on an affective and aesthetic level. These practices pierce the veneer of settler permanence and normativity through everyday acts of resurgence.While settler colonialism works to eliminate and erase Indigenous presence, Romero's and Dorame's pieces work to make the land, the Tongva people, and the responsibilities to and with land visible. The Tongvaland project aims, in the words of Romero, "to convey that LA is a Native space; that the Tongva People are here, and that it is our responsibility—whether we ourselves are Native or not—to educate ourselves about whose land we are on" ("Tongvaland Project"). The artwork billboards, including Weshoyot Alvitre's iconic revisioning of the Hollywood sign to read "Tongvaland," explores themes of "invisibility, survivance, and belonging to a place" in highly visible public art and advertising spaces. Romero's billboard of Aguilera in "full regalia with sunglasses resting on her traditional basket hat" juxtaposed with an airplane flying overhead can be jarring to passersby in a way that evokes the old American Indian Movement adage "We are still here." The juxtaposition can create what José Medina calls "epistemic friction" to disrupt settler taken-for-granted assumptions about space and place (Medina 29). Settler common sense becomes visible to settlers only when it comes to be experienced as strange. As such, cognitive and emotional turmoil is necessary for critical epistemic introspection. While epistemic exclusions are hard to see and name, they can be felt.Similarly, Goeman emphasizes that the billboards also map "a road to caring for a place despite the noise and reverberation of mass consumerism" ("Caring for Landscapes" 57; emphasis added). For example, the piece "Mercedes at Kuruvungna," which depicts a woman floating with arms open wide in the Kuruvungna Sacred Springs near West Los Angeles, both reveals the beauty of Tovaangar alongside the "gritty streets of LA" and creates a pull to care ("Caring for Landscapes" 57). Dorame's installation "Our Land and Sky Waking Up—'Eyoo'ooxon Koy Tokuupar Chorii'aa" places pictures of her family, taken at the protest of development of her ancestral lands, so that they overlook cultural objects that were "disinterred through the violent process of development" ("Caring for Landscapes" 55). The piece invites viewers "to think through land from her curious arrangements" and create a collective practice to "undo settler space together" ("Caring for Landscapes" 51). These pieces embody Indigenous futurity and relationality, and as such, can serve to wake viewers from their colonial unknowing.While these cartographic art productions might do work to disrupt or unsettle colonial spatialities, these pieces are not aimed at trying to convince or persuade a settler audience, or to achieve some sort of state-sanctioned recognition (especially since the Gabrieliño Tongva are not federally recognized). These works, as forms of Indigenous graffiti, remain distinctly outside of the purview of state recognition and are about "relaying and prioritizing how they wanted to be seen in their homelands" ("Caring for Landscapes" 51). As Romero writes, "the images on these billboards tell the story of making relations with Tongva people, listening to how they relate to their ancestral homelands, the stories they want to tell—and, the stories they don't want to tell" ("Tongvaland Project"). These practices highlight and amplify agency and networks of care. For this reason, Goeman characterizes these art works as "anti-colonial aesthetics and care practices" ("Caring for Landscapes" 50).Moreover, these art works can be read as generative refusals to be "unseen" or to be seen according to settler colonial logic. In this respect, they recall Kahnawà:ke Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson's work showing how refusal can be a political and ethical stance of disengagement that enacts sovereignty and resurgence. Refusal here serves the purpose of "turning away" from the legitimizing gaze of settler authority and from the "presumed 'good' of multicultural politics" toward revitalized, self-generated, transformative models of self-determination (A. Simpson 11).These cartographic art practices reveal and disrupt colonial unknowing by showing the cracks (or the remainder) of settler colonial delocalized space. For this reason, Goeman affirms that "graffiti is the critique necessary and valuable to understanding interlocking structures of oppression" ("Caring for Landscapes" 51). In her words, "graffiti is the memories and practices of gendered forms that undo the evidence of our subjugation, rupture land as merely property, and can undo the separation of humans and non-humans" ("Caring for Landscapes" 52). The art works—such as River Garza's billboard "What the City Gave Us," which presents a collage of images and graffiti inscriptions to point out "the hypocrisy of manifest destiny" and shatter a romanticized narrative mapping of the city of Angels—deny the permanence of settler colonialism and expose maps as "powerful maps of commerce and subjugation" ("Caring for Landscapes" 52). As such, the art works amplify what remains in the reduction of land as kinship to land as object, and what remains of the relational connections when viewed through the prism of capitalist liberal individualism. Goeman's characterizations of these art practices as communities of care and relationality emphasize them as rematriation, "which is not just about changing ownership, but it is a return to the sacred" ("Caring for Landscapes" 57; emphasis added). A return to the sacred and to relational ways of knowing can chip away at a colonial unknowing that tries to uphold an epistemic mastery. For this reason, I see Goeman's address as illustrating the fact that arguments can only go so far and that the embodied experience of care and relationality—as evidenced in these art works—can go further in revealing the cracks in the veneer of settler colonial spatiality and in re-envisioning better relationships with the land and with each other.