Joshua L. Reid. The Sea Is My Country

In The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs, an Indigenous Borderlands People, Joshua L. Reid opens with an account of the Makah community’s successful 1999 whale hunt off the northernmost shores of Washington State. In the hands of a less insightful scholar, the event might have been used to simply cap off the increasingly familiar historical narrative of Indigenous cultural resistance alongside tribal economic and political adaptability. But Reid does something far more interesting. In setting up his community-engaged ethnohistorical study, and in making the argument that the Makah people are best understood as a distinctively maritime borderlands people, Reid also sheds fresh light on the inner workings of American settler colonialism. Illustrative of the latent violence that continues to inform settler colonial attitudes in America, Reid quotes a letter to the editor of the Seattle Times wherein a prominent television and film producer, upset by the whale hunt, states, “I am anxious to know where I might apply for a license to kill Indians” (3). Reid’s comprehensive history of the two centuries leading up to the 1999 whale hunt reveals the way in which discursive settler colonial strategies built upon old canards (and used by groups as diverse as liberal environmentalists, on the one hand, and what are typically described as rednecks, on the other) continue to be mobilized to undermine Indigenous rights and sovereignty.

Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Colonialism · Ethnology · Indigenous · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Sovereignty · State (computer science) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies