Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Meredith Alberta Palmer "The Partial Indian in the Infrastructures of Termination"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
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Abstract: This sixth and final chapter of my book manuscript continues to track the previous chapter’s work on the partial Indian figure of the mid-20th century US colonialism, within Haudenosaunee country. I situate the 1955 reforms in the US public health research and the Indian Health Service within policies of Termination and Relocation--the federal government’s dual attempt to dissolve all tribal sovereignty and landholdings in the US (1940s-1970s), and to move Native people to urban centers. New York State development projects in this same era became Termination and Relocation by another means under the liberal guise of ‘emancipation,’ in the rush of a colonial developmentalist state. Analyzing congressional hearings, scientific research done on Seneca and Tuscarora people, public health studies, and Haudenosaunee community publications from the era, this chapter argues that the ostensible evidence of the partial Indian was used by scientists and state actors ambivalently, rather than structured by a single logic. Such evidence was put to work in political debates about Termination to argue that Native peoples must acculturate within the US thus dissolving tribal lands and US state recognized Indigenous sovereignty, and also in scientific discourse about the biophysical risks and impossibilities of Indigenous acculturation. What appears as a bureaucratic means of identification is revealed to be a project of infrastructural, spatial, and ontological violence. At the same time, a range of contemporary Haudenosaunee research projects highlight the multiple failures of this representative effort.