Ep. 158: How Notions of 'Blight' and 'Barrenness' Were Manufactured to Erase Indigenous Peoples

"It is safe to say that almost no city needs to tolerate slums," wrote New York City official Robert Moses in 1945. "Our ancestors came across the ocean in sailing ships you wouldn't go across a lake in. When they arrived, there was nothing here," Ross Perot proclaimed in 1996. "We proved we can create a budding garden out of obstinate ground," beamed Israeli president Shimon Peres in 2011.

These quotes recurring themes within the lore of settler-colonial states: Before settlers arrived in the United States, Israel, and other colonized places throughout the world, the land was barren, wild, and blighted, the people backward, untameable, and violent; nothing of societal importance existed. It was only when the monied industrialists and developers moved in, introducing their capital and their vision, that civilization began.

This, of course, is false. Indigenous people inhabited North America long before Europeans did. Poor, often Black and Latino, people populate many neighborhoods targeted for gentrification. So how do these people–inhabitants of coveted places who prove inconvenient to capital–become erased from collective memory? And what role do media like newspapers, brochures, travel dispatches, and adventure books play in their erasure?

In a previous Citations Needed episode (Ep. 155: How the American Settler-Colonial Project Shaped Popular Notions of ‘Conservation’), we discussed the erasure of indigeneity, we explored the colonialist and racist foundations of conservationism in the US and elsewhere in the West. On this episode, a sort of follow-up to that episode, we explore how images and narratives of barrenness and blight are manufactured to justify the settler-colonial project, from 15th Century colonial subjects of Europe to urban neighborhoods of today.

Our guest is scholar Stephanie Lumsden.

***

Guest

Stephanie Lumsden is an Enrolled Member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA.

****

Show Notes

The Doctrine of Discovery

Pope Alexander VI | May 4, 1493 | The Guilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Proclamation of Terra Nullius

Governor Bourke | October 10, 1835 | Migration Heritage Centre

U.S. Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz | April 18, 2015 | Organization of American Historians

Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S. Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans

Rebecca Onion and Claudio Saunt | June 17, 2014 | Slate, Invasion of America

Revealing the history of genocide against California’s Native Americans

Jessica Wolf | August 15, 2017 | UCLA Newsroom

Rupture in heritage: strategies of dispossession, elimination and co-resistance 

Feras Hammami | January 24, 2022 | Settler-Colonial Studies

Operation Desert Bloom: The Zionist Myth that Won't Spoil, Wither, or Die

Nima Shirazi | June 30, 2011 | Wide Asleep in America

Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native 

Patrick Wolfe | December 21, 2006 | Journal of Genocide Research

Slums and City Planning

Robert Moses | January 1945 | The Atlantic

Remembering the Ramifications of Robert Moses's Lincoln Square Renewal Project

Karissa Krenz | August 8, 2020 | WQXR

Lincoln Square Renewal Project (New York, 1955-1969): A case of culture vs. community

Jessica Lin | December 16, 2020 | Story Maps

Robert Moses and the Visual Dimension of Physical Disorder: Efforts to Demonstrate Urban Blight in the Age of Slum Clearance

Themis Chronopoulos | May 14, 2013 | Journal of Planning History

Robert Moses Reconsidered: Blight Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Roberta Brandes Gratz | April 2, 2007 | City Limits

The Ugly, Violent Clearing Of Chavez Ravine Before It Was Home To The Dodgers

Elina Shatkin | October 17, 2018 | LAist

The Battle of Chavez Ravine

Thomas S. Hines | April 20, 1997 | The Los Angeles Times

Boyle Heights Public Housing Complex Feels Effects of Artwashing and Gentrification

Simon Campuzano | June 25, 2021 | Knock LA

*****

Transcript

For a complete transcript of this episode, go here.

******