The Spirit of Settler Colonialism and the City Streets: A Response to Mishuana Goeman

i want thank dr. goeman for her excellent paper and for introducing us to these extraordinary artists. Their work is beautiful and important, and I am grateful for the opportunity to witness it and think about it and to consider in particular in its relation to its setting in Los Angeles.In what follows, I want to consider that setting—a city, as Dr. Goeman notes, containing some of "the most expensive real estate properties in the United States," commercial areas officially defined by "colonial encompassing property logics," and marked by "noise and [the] reverberation of mass consumerism" ("Caring for Landscapes 57). My interest will be in putting Dr. Goeman's analysis of these works and the Indigenous artist-activists who create them in dialogue with Jane Addams's diagnosis of the problems of early twentieth-century American urban life in her book The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. I will suggest that Dr. Goeman's paper illuminates the limitations of Addams's approach to responding to the alienation of modern urban life—which, while rightly critical of the harms of mass consumer culture and the reduction of city life to economic productivity in conditions of industrialization, does not grapple with its own implication in settler colonialism and dispossession, and therefore cannot care for the land or its inhabitants as these artists invite us to do. I will also invite her to reflect on whether Addams's suggestion that play and recreation are essential components of urban human flourishing is borne out in the work of these artists.Jane Addams, in 1909, discussed the problems of urban life in post-Industrial Revolution Chicago in similar terms to those Dr. Goeman uses to describe the contemporary landscape of Los Angeles. The contemporary city, Addams writes, in forgoing spaces for public play, art, creativity, and non-production, has "entered upon a most difficult and dangerous experiment . . . at the very moment when the city has become distinctly industrial, and daily labor is continually more monotonous and subdivided" (4–5). In this context, young people are increasingly alienated and isolated, valued solely for the products of their labor, and desperate for social connection. The playfulness and creativity of youth cannot be entirely stifled, yet without clear public spaces or institutions for outlets, young people become easy targets for capitalists who promise pleasure and self-actualization through consumption—of liquor, of fashion, of music, and so on. Lamenting the impoverished state that the city of mass consumption leaves us in, Addams writes: The spontaneous joy, the clamor for pleasure, the desire of the young people to appear finer and better and altogether more lovely than they really are, the idealization not only of each other but of the whole earth which they regard but as a theater for their noble exploits, the unworldly ambitions, the romantic hopes, the make-believe world in which they live, if properly utilized, what might they not do to make our sordid cities more beautiful, more companionable? And yet at the present moment every city is full of young people who are utterly bewildered and uninstructed in regard to the basic experience which must inevitably come to them, and which has varied, remote and indirect expressions. (15–16)There is, for Addams, a basic human need for play, creativity, and connection—to a community and to the natural world itself—whose unsatisfaction in a city devoted entirely to industry is nothing short of dehumanizing. So basic are these needs that they cry out for fulfillment in the most unexpected moments. She quotes a young man who describes his experience thusly: I never had a chance to go into the country when I was a kid, but I remember one day when I had to deliver a package way out on the west side, that I saw a flock of sheep in Douglas Park. I had never thought that a sheep could be anywhere but in a picture, and when I saw those big white spots on the green grass beginning to move and to turn into sheep, I felt exactly as if St. Cecilia had come out of her frame over the organ and was walking in the park. (qtd. in Addams 18)We need, according to Addams, to provide in our cities opportunities for citizens to have experiences like this: parks, public spaces for recreation, access to reminders that their lives are never entirely disconnected from one another nor from the natural world. On this view, recreation and play that connect us with nature are pleasurable, but not frivolous: they are indispensable components of a full human life.It seems that Addams recognizes, as Dr. Goeman puts it, that "turning land into property by creating it as a commodity and severing the deep relations of the people . . . caused its desecration . . . [and] the ongoing commercialization in the landscape . . . is harming all, not just First Peoples" (Goeman, "Caring for Landscapes" 58). Yet Addams did not recognize nor grapple (in her theoretical work or in her activism) with the realities of dispossession, nor with the colonialist attitudes toward Indigenous people on which her social reform solutions were based. Lest we think such awareness is expecting too much of Addams, it is worth remembering a few things: first, at the time of Addams's writing, Chicago's recent 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition had just given Native Americans a place of prominence in the city, of which she almost certainly would have been aware. Indigenous peoples' participation in the World's Fair was very much a mixed bag, historians report—they were portrayed by promoters of the then-nascent field of anthropology as "a remembrance of the past," whereas "many of those Indians who participated were carving out new economic pathways into the future" (Beck xviii), recognizing in the fair opportunities for their own advancement. In any case, Addams could not have failed to know about the continued presence of Indigenous people in the Chicago area or in the United States more broadly, nor about the role their dispossession played in the foundation of her own settlement house. Second, Addams does explicitly reference Indigenous people in her work—assuming, it seems, the common framework amongst white intellectuals at the time that human civilization is the story of progress from savagery to industry. The Hull House Labor Museum, as Marilyn Fischer notes, featured a textile exhibit that "traced the orderly evolution from the spinning of the Navajo woman . . . to the most complicated machine" (52). Finally, as Fischer has also pointed out, Addams's argument about cultural pluralism and the value that diverse cultures bring to an American one that is "too thin" by virtue of its materialism is predicated entirely on the notion that "culture" is the province of Europeans—traditions produced, in Fischer's words, "over there" (51). As Fischer rightly argues, this assumption ignores the thorough Americanness of African American culture (a potentially surprising fact, given Addams's involvement in the anti-lynching movement and her reading of Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk). It seems that this argument would also extend to Indigenous American cultures, which, as Dr. Goeman's paper shows, are both rich in their artistic and critical contributions, very much alive, and extraordinarily well-positioned to offer precisely the sort of corrective to the reductive materialism that Addams was hoping for.I will close with this final reflection. The art works in this presentation are extraordinary not only for their subject matter, but for their surprising placement: on billboards, in commercial centers, in public parks. This artistic choice has the effect, Dr. Goeman writes, of "unveil[ing] the colonial architecture" ("Caring for Landscapes" 57) that surrounds them, bringing the colonialist consumerism of the modern city into relief by contrast. In addition to its refusal of colonial aesthetics and its "refusal to be unseen" ("Caring for Landscapes" 58), I wonder if there is not also something about this choice that is playful, even if not whimsical. I am thinking here of Dr. Goeman's laughter at the location of Mercedes at Kuruvunga, of the satirical style of the Tongvaland sign, of the offering of baseballs at the altar of Dorame's installation at Los Angeles State Historic Park. Playfulness need not be trivial, after all, as Addams's work rightly shows—it is humanizing, it is connecting, it is a refusal to be reduced to our productivity. Perhaps, in other words, we might also see these Indigenous artists in Los Angeles as showing just how deeply significant the human need for play is, and how profoundly rooted that play is in the landscape from which it emerges. Addams may have understood this on some level, but it is only in view of these art works that we see the full anti-colonial implications.