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Speaker:  Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, Assistant Prof. of Geography, Univ. of Victoria

The American legend of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, has underpinned popular folk narratives about the development of the United States, particularly in the Upper Midwest, for over a century. The larger-than-life lumberjack is commemorated across the United States with statues, monuments and other spaces dedicated to honoring him and his ‘role’ in shaping the geographies of frontier America. However, the legacy of Paul Bunyan has a darker side–it serves to obscure the real-life dispossession and destruction of environments and spaces in which Indigenous peoples have inhabited and have had relationships with dating to before colonization.

Building off of the work done by Nik Nerburn in his ‘zine’ In The Shadow Of Paul Bunyan (2014), this talk traces the history of the legend of Paul Bunyan and places it alongside settler colonial development and environmental degradation, bringing these histories into conversation with awareness (or lack thereof) surrounding historical and contemporaneous Indigenous relationships to land and environment, particularly in Northern Minnesota. By doing this, I build the argument that the ways that the settler state rhetorically constructs its own environments and geographies serves as a ‘whitewashing’ and elimination of Indigenous environments and geographies, which is part and parcel of settler colonialism.

Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria. A citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, their work focuses on critical Indigenous geographies, and the ways in which Indigenous nations contend with climate crisis. They are the principal investigator of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory, one of Western Canada’s first Indigenous geographies focused labs. Smiles holds a bachelor’s degree in Geography from St. Cloud State University, a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota Duluth, and a PhD in Geography from The Ohio State University, where they also spent a year as a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of History.

This event is supported by the Macalester Native and Indigenous (MNI) Initiative.