Genocide in the sculpture garden and talking back to settler colonialism

In this essay, I explore how Native American rhetoric of resistance exposes the settler colonial logics that constitute a hegemonic force in the greater social imaginary. Focusing on two sites—the Minneapolis Walker Arts Center’s Scaffold exhibit and The Landing, a historic settlers’ village located twenty miles from the Walker—I assess both how settler colonialism is enacted in these spaces and how Native American activism represents a talking back to settler colonialism. I argue that examining places as networked arguments reveals the ways in which they can speak to each other and unsettle dominant ideologies. To better understand the settler colonial logics that Native American resistance rhetoric seeks to unsettle, I advocate for critical examination of how scholars and activists are constituted by those very centering logics.