Unlearning a territory
Jurisdictions of the Anthropocene
Sadie Luetmer’s project will entail writing about the headwaters region in Minnesota, Anishinaabe territory, reflecting upon the maps and relations she once learned and is now unlearning and learning again—and how they frame and reframe the political ecology of a place.
As it flows, the Mississippi collects, bleeds into, lives through, and must survive a series of territories that have been meticulously and violently mapped into definition by a settler state. These imagined and (re)produced geographies normalize cultural and political forms of settler colonialism. They intend to tell us how place and space meet, which boundaries matter, where power lives, and how it moves. This piece explores what it means to unlearn and unrecognize those imaginaries. It is a small window into an experiment with locality and positionality, an attempt to relearn territory as the Anthropocene poses fundamental questions of how polities and ecologies fit together.
