Content area
Full text
The trees at the heart of this paper are not an isolated story but contribute to the machinery of the settler colonial present, feeding off indigenous dispossession of the Arkansas Ozarks. In this paper, I explore "trail trees," a form of culturally-modified tree used to sustain and perpetuate replacement narratives romanticizing a lost Native American past and constructing a pure, modern, scientific "reality" of White settler possession of the region. My critique is directed at the settler colonial worldview and the systems through which it is constructed, legitimated, and spread. I ask: What is at stake for advocates for the existence of "trail trees"? What can disrupt and dismantle the "trail tree" discourse and the replacement narrative that it functions within? What work can we do to create an opening for anti-colonial praxis? The answers to these questions involve direct engagement with conservation and conservationists and the narratives of replacement that suffuse their work.
Key words: conservation, culturally-modified trees, settler colonial, ethnography, settler ontocide
It is a hot summer day, so hot that the conservation corps hot weather protocol is in effect, so there are more breaks and a shorter work week. Dressed in sweat-stained work gear and green and yellow hardhats (crew members and crew leaders, respectively), we're on a welcome afternoon break away from the chainsaws in the shade of some live oaks. We're drinking from battered Nalgene bottles, pulling out stashed snacks, or lounging in the shade. It's too hot for much beyond light banter. Usually, one parks employee works with the crew, sometimes working alongside us or merely supervising. Our parks employee contact for today is Bill,1 a deeply suntanned man in his 60s.
Bill brings out a white bucket or three from the back seat of his pickup truck and asks us if we want to learn something. He deposits several heavy buckets, some full of tools, some apparently full of rocks, and then he rolls out a large off-white canvas drop cloth. The rocks turn out to be flint and chert, some already showing cleavages. One of the crew leaders, already interested in experimental archaeology, quickly identifies some tools and the raw materials for flint-knapping. He passes around some tools for pressure flaking, an antler, and a homemade...