Esme G. Murdock
San Diego State University
This presentation examines the hidden agencies of settler homes made with stolen Indigenous lands, labors, and lives through a close analysis of Fleur Pillager’s revenge upon the colonizer who stole her tribe’s wooded territories in Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls. In this presentation, I put the forced navigation of ecological and existential violence that settler worlds require of the colonized in conversation with the making of terror and terrortories expressed by Frantz Fanon in Wretched of the Earth as the experience of ‘veritable apocalypse.’ Specifically, I examine how Fleur uses her tracking skills to repossess her homelands through her navigation of the house itself and through inscribing a familiarity within the domicile that is largely illegible to settlers. As such I carve out a space for examining the environmental agency of land, territory, built-environment, and the transmogrification of the more-than-human world and relatives in contexts of settler colonialism as well as the decolonial praxis enacted through the creative adaptation of Indigenous kinship practices to these circumstances.
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