Surveying the Colonialscape: An Interview with Andrew Curley

All Steve Lyons

As one of The Natural History Museum’s inaugural Red Natural History Fellows, Diné geographer Andrew Curley is examining the contestation of water rights within the Colorado River basin. In this edited conversation with NHM’s Steve Lyons, Curley takes on the colonial structures that shape mainstream trends in environmental science, asking how academic research cultures and institutional practices contribute to the replication of settler-colonial relations in the United States.

Steve Lyons (SL) I want to start with the question of Indigenous erasure. In your recent “Red Natural History” essay on “Dinosaurs, Eugenics and Collapse,” you explore how Western scientific understandings of the world are premised on a colonial blindspot—a kind of inability to see how colonization transformed the world on the one hand, and an inability to see how Indigenous peoples have had agency in these processes on the other. This blindness has real consequences for how natural historians understand how we got to the current crisis and where we need to go from here.

In my mind, your new work on the Colorado River hammers this home. You talk about how contemporary environmental science participates in naturalizing settler-colonial infrastructures like dams and cities—not only by accepting settler-colonial units of analysis like the acre-foot, a quantification necessary to attribute value to the land and water as a resource, but also by serving the needs of the settler-colonial “water managers,” who are responsible for maintaining the legal frameworks that have been disastrous for the river.

Could you tell us about what is taken for granted in the mainstream of your discipline? And what are the risks of accepting these basic assumptions? What role do scientists and scholars play in legitimizing colonial water laws and in preserving these colonial intrusions, making them seem like inevitable parts of the landscape, rather than as parts of the problem?

Andrew Curley (AC) Working within academic institutions, it is striking that they are uncritical or unreflective of their own culpability in the production of a colonial epistemology. I think this is consistent with the premise of the “Red Natural History” project, where we are thinking about how people who define their work within a narrow understanding of science replicate and reproduce colonial divisions and understandings of the natural landscape, which Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt calls a “colonialscape.”

We’re surrounded by this colonialscape. We’re subsumed in it. I look around me and I have mountains that are all named after settlers who have no relationship with the place. This is a dominant feature of settler-colonial geography, and one that is largely left uncriticized among white settler scholars. This seems like an obvious point, but it seems so profound for the people who actually are critiqued, as if they’ve never thought of this before.

The Colorado River is artificially divided between these political entities called States, which claim a strong interest in the river: Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico. These states are artificial, but they have real political leverage and power to access the waters. These states made an agreement in 1922, only 100 years ago, to divide the entirety of the river among themselves, creating a boundary at a place called Lees Ferry, which separates two basins: the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin. Contemporary environmental scientists measure the river according to these artificial political divisions, naturalizing the way that the state governments divided the river in 1922.

A view down Glen Canyon at the Lees Ferry damsite, 1922. Photo: Eugene C. LaRue. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

What is more, following the division of the river, there were a number of violent intrusions onto the natural pathway of the river in the form of huge hydrological dams, some of the biggest and most notorious in the world, including the Hoover Dam. The purpose of these dams was not only to generate electricity, but also to create reservoirs to create a cache of water for urbanizing areas that did not have a natural access to the river, including Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Scientists legitimize those dams when they organize their studies around the water levels in reservoirs that are recent intrusions onto the river. I am interested in how contemporary environmental scientists often conflate two ways of understanding the river. First, they take the status of the river as it exists now, after this violent scramble to move the waters all throughout the West for agribusiness and then urban expansion. And second, they consider the implications of climate change on the river by comparing it to the river as it existed in 1400, 1300, 1100, as if we’re talking about the same thing. We learn very little about how the river transformed by tracing the fluctuation of precipitation in the region or the longstanding weather patterns. What really transformed the river was colonialism. In the environmental sciences, you can’t point to that. You have to point to everything else.

This begs the question: what is the value of this science if it can’t even name the culprit? I think it’s farcical that people in my business pretend like they’re doing science, while excluding the history and contemporary existence of colonialism. If you were to take an objective viewpoint, you would immediately see that the origin of the water crisis on the Colorado River isn’t climate change. It is the overuse of the river. And that overuse goes back to the late 19th century, when agribusiness began developing along these tributaries.

The Institution of Colonial Science

SL You’re touching on a few points I wanted to raise. One was about how science has a material effect on the world. As scientists respond to the changing “colonialscape,” as you put it, they risk reproducing, strengthening, and legitimizing this colonialscape. You’re building a critical picture of what The Natural History Museum describes as a dominant imperialist tradition of natural history—a natural history that naturalizes settler-colonial infrastructure, which preserves the system that’s driving the very crisis that it seeks to understand.

I’m wondering if you can help us understand how this actually works in practice. How, in your experience navigating the university, for example, are students and researchers being trained or incentivized to participate in the maintenance of the settler-colonial regime? It’s clearly not just that scientists are immoral people. There’s an entire apparatus that privileges some methodologies above others, as well as the kinds of questions that get asked and the kinds of research that gets funded.

AC I’m in a geography department because I couldn’t do the work I wanted to do in sociology, which is the discipline I was trained in. Critical geography has shortcomings, which myself and others are quick to point out, but in disciplines like public policy, economics, or sociology, scholars are actively denying Indigenous voices and concerns. Scholars in these fields tend to imagine themselves to be in dialogue with policymakers, both in the sense of informing policy and sharing glasses of wine. They ignore Indigenous claims and issues because Indigenous issues will never be policy priorities under a colonial regime. Working on the rights and issues of Indigenous Peoples is not going to get you a seat at the table with lawmakers.

As you said, these aren’t immoral people. Many of them are really nice. But colonialists don’t always come in pilgrim hats or on wagons with oxen that are easy to identify. They come to your coffee shops. They run the cooperative markets selling alternative foods. The problem isn’t the people, but the options available to people who work a society premised on settler-colonialism. There is a whole culture of practice that results in the replication of the colonial system.

In the case of scientific research, a lot of it comes down to funding. The National Science Foundation and other major funders that supply the material basis for research in the United States prioritize universalizing claims, questions that address a majoritarianism issue, which will always be the settler-colonial issue. So if I go to the NSF and say I want to research Navajo water issues, they will ask: “What’s the broader implication of this research? How will it help non-Navajos, i.e. settlers, deal with their water issues? If we’re going to give you money, you have to convince us that it benefits the ‘larger society’,” by which they mean the white colonial society.

When Indigenous work comes down the pipeline, funders can get really defensive. This work runs up against oppositional forces, doesn’t get a lot of funding, and Indigenous scientists and scholars are forced to work within a whole institutional culture that understands science and Indigenous issues as incommensurate. This is not a new phenomenon, and I’m not the first person to point it out.

Writing in 1959, the critical sociologist C. Wright Mills used the term “abstracted empiricism” to describe how science was just doing its thing, publishing results without asking important questions. Mills wasn’t even referring to that Indigenous, Black, or Latinx issues that we are now considering. He was just saying that science had become a kind of cynical, self-funded industry, interested only in publishing results, getting funding, and judging success by the number of citations, regardless of the quality of engagement and the amount of funding received. I don’t think it’s an accident that a lot of people have become very upset with universities, accusing them of being distant from the broader experiences of people. There’s a lot of truth to it.

Two Perspectives on Water

SL In your new writing on the Colorado River, you take on the abstracting tendencies of Western science, contrasting them to the grounded and specific place-based knowledges of Indigenous Nations. I’m wondering if you can expand on your critique of abstraction. What are the problems with abstraction, or, if not abstraction itself, what are the uses of abstraction that you take issue with?

AC In 1987, Derek Sayer wrote “The Violence of Abstraction,” and while he was writing in a totally different context, the title is really good. What is the violence of abstraction? And in the case I’m researching, what is the violence of abstraction in the scientific research on the Colorado River? In this case, what becomes abstracted is water. Within the colonial theory of knowledge, water becomes quantified through the measure of the “acre-foot.” And it is in this quantifiable unit that water can become tradable, sellable, and negotiated as the basis of a right of use or right to exploit. This quantification was necessary before the water could be moved out of the landscape upon which it flowed, which was the landscape that Indigenous Peoples had experienced and learned from before colonization.

I should stress that “Indigenous” is not a homogenous thing. We’re using the term in contradistinction to settler society, but there are different Nations with their own knowledge systems. There are nearly 30 federally recognized Tribes that have some sort of claim to the Colorado River or its tributaries. Each of these nations (and internally within them) have different kinds of experience, depending on where they live and what kind of uses they’ve needed from the water. I can’t speak for Havasupai. I can’t speak for Hopi. I can’t speak for Zuni. I can’t speak for Ute. I can’t speak for Tohono O’odham, or any of these other Nations.

But thinking about it from the Diné perspective, from the Navajo perspective, water is understood in different forms, depending on place and space. It can be a pool of water in a canyon. It can be a spring that’s known, that’s drawn from aquifer water. It can be surface water, a river, a tributary wash. It can be a large water source, like what is now called the Colorado River. Those are all different kinds of water that exist on the landscape. And then there’s precipitation—different kinds of rains. You have the hard rain, the light rain, the snow. The planting seasons are tied to observations of water, both in the air and on the landscape, over generations of experience. This is science in my definition.

SL In your essay for our Social Text dossier, you write that “Conceptual colonialism creeps into everyday sciences, especially the natural sciences, where Indigenous people play Tonto-like roles to the real world work done by Lone Ranger scientists.” Later in the text you argue that in contemporary environmental discourse, this role is also given to Traditional Ecological Knowledge, which, like Tonto, is treated like “something supporting but not fundamentally challenging to Western epistemology.” Can you explain this metaphor, as well as how you see “TEK” being deployed and domesticated in settler science and scholarship?

AC The Tonto-Lone Ranger metaphor is meant to highlight a dynamic we see in academic research culture: you have the Indian sidekick or the Indian paid researcher, but the Principal Investigator (P.I.)—the person running the show—will be a white person who is interested in solving settler-colonial questions, like “How is Phoenix going to develop a more sustainable use of water?” Or, “How are we going to deal with the rural agrarian interests that are inheriting a legacy of land deprivation between Tucson and Phoenix?” The P.I. will include Indigenous Peoples in their grant, either to get more grant funding by claiming that the project is supporting a diversity of scholarship, or to somehow assuage their colonial guilt. But they won’t actually deal with Indigenous questions.

There are two main problems with how “traditional ecological knowledge” gets used. First, it is often used in a way that homogenizes knowledge systems, as though there is one Indigenous perspective. Even amongst ourselves in the Southwest, we have very different understandings of the world around us and very different histories. Lumping all of these understandings together as “TEK” is already a disservice to us. Second, TEK tends to only get used when it supports the existing colonial epistemology. If my traditional knowledge suggests that your whole approach to the environmental question is wrong, it will not have the same kind of leverage as it would if it suggests that we’re also seeing something that scientists are seeing.

SL In the current struggles over water rights on the Colorado River, how would you distinguish between the kinds of questions that are being asked in settler society and those that are being asked on the Navajo Nation, for example?

AC This is a harder part of the question to answer because it requires me to go out into the communities and get a sense of what people’s water concerns are and how they are not being addressed by the colonial water regime.

I attended a couple of forums recently on a proposed water settlement between the Navajo Nation and the state of Arizona. The presenters were water attorneys, who were trying to explain to the people what water rights are, what acre-feet are, all of these things that scientists and policymakers are concerned with. People sat through five hours of presentations before they had a chance to weigh in with their concerns about the overuse of water for industry, the depletion of aquifer water for the coal industry on the reservation, the lack of water security in the household, uranium contamination from previous mining activities around the reservation, and the cost of water.

Image produced for “The Colorado River and the Colonial Blind Spot,” a virtual event with Andrew Curley, Teresa Montoya, Traci Brynne Voyles and Erika M. Bsumek, March 2024.

On the reservation, people in the Navajo Nation are concerned about water security and water quality. And so they’re thinking about where they are getting their water from. What kind of water is it? Is it something that they can feed to their livestock? Is it something that they can consume in the household? Are the wells producing water? Do they need to pipe it in? Do they need to go into the city and buy water in jugs through these filtration stations that you have outside of grocery stores, or even in these plastic containers?

If you go outside the reservation world, you’re not going to hear the same questions. You’re going to hear about rights, diversions, reservoir levels and political agreements between the state of Arizona and the other Colorado River basin states. For the states and policymakers, the whole conversation about Indigenous water issues is about settling Indigenous water claims to the Colorado River. What they need to know is how much water Indian people are going to claim, because the whole system relies on all of these exact numbers fitting into this larger puzzle. And the pieces that are missing from that puzzle are in the Indigenous water claims. They’re unknown. They’re not part of the system yet.

Instituting Red Natural History

SL In your work, you make a very strong claim that traditional knowledge or Diné knowledge has scientific merit beyond the moral or ethical obligations that ground it. You write that “this isn’t some mystic understanding of water and the land. Their knowledge is practical and necessary for survival.” Where Western science or colonial science has so often denigrated Indigenous understandings as mystical mumbo jumbo, your work is exposing how so-called “objective” scientific claims are built on mythologies, among them the myth that natural processes can be seen outside of the social, economic, legal and political and historical processes that shape them. This is central to the project that we’re naming “red natural history.”

I’m wondering how you understand “red natural history.” Where do you see its outlines? What are the values or normative claims that should ground red natural history? And what do you think needs to be done with the colonial institutions that already exist?

AC That’s a big question. I think what is interesting about this idea of red natural history is that it asks us to confront not only the ideas, but also the institutions that support those ideas. Ideas don’t exist in a world without institutions that support them. Take museums, for example. The role of museums is to tell a story to a certain kind of public. But in mainstream natural history museums, those stories often reinforce colonial narratives. Natural historians are brought in to naturalize colonialism—to say that the situation we are in was inevitable. This reproduces colonial violence on a regular basis.

In the university, the institutional context I work within, the research I am most frustrated with is coming out of the traditional disciplines. I use the word “traditional” here to refer to the colonial sciences, even geography, which was an imperial science, and continues to be in many ways, as well as anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, business. All of these disciplines really need to be critically reevaluated. In the neoliberal university, these disciplines tend to attract the most majors because they have a reputation for preparing students for “real world” jobs. But “the real world” is a colonial world. When people ask “how does this work in the real world?” what they mean to say is, “put away all these ideas of a better future and just focus on how to survive in the world that exists around you.” I think this is a real disservice to students. It makes 20 year olds cynical about changing the world.

So what can we do about it? While the stuff coming out of those research disciplines is frustrating, I am most interested in the work that is coming out of the more marginalized disciplines, like Native American/American Indian studies. My colleagues in Native American studies are teaching me to unlearn some of the things I learned from my training in sociology, and to learn how to think through and with Indigenous epistemology.

Returning to the Colorado River, what Native American studies provides are tools for us to conceptualize ourselves outside of the bind of the existing water rights regime. I think this is necessary—and may even be inevitable. If we continue to avoid addressing the finiteness of water, sooner or later we’re going to be confronted with it. Things that are seen as unmovable and concrete today, like the Colorado Compact and the division of the waters between the states, might evaporate. To imagine other possibilities, which I think is the basis of scientific inquiry, we need to push against this mythology of progress and domination that orients colonial science, and to start again from grounded observations about the world itself.

Andrew Curley (Diné) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona and a 2023-25 Red Natural History Fellow. His research focuses on the everyday incorporation of Indigenous nations into colonial economies. Building on ethnographic research, his publications speak to how Indigenous communities understand coal, energy, land, water, infrastructure, and development in an era of energy transition and climate change. Curley’s first book Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation (University of Arizona Press) came out in 2023.

With every superstorm, flood, drought, or heatwave, the uneven effects of climate change are made clear. Coastal communities in the poorer nations are displaced from their homelands while wealthy nations move to tighten border restrictions. Private fire services are hired to protect mansions from wildfires as working-class neighborhoods burn to the ground. The most exploited workers toil in dangerously hot and humid conditions as the managerial classes work from air conditioned offices, or, increasingly, from home. Climate change is not waging direct violence so much as it is heightening the contradictions of capitalism, clarifying the stakes of struggle.

Out of these contradictions, people around the world are turning to old and new ideas and tactics. In Ecuador and Bolivia, Indigenous and socialist activists and politicians have instituted the Rights of Nature as official policy, establishing new legal levers and precedents to ward off the predation of the fossil fuel industry in the Amazon rainforest. In the US, the Red Nation is organizing for Indigenous socialism, connecting the slow violence of climate change to the ongoing and systemic violence of capitalism and settler colonialism. Proposals for Red, Black, and Internationalist Green New Deals are being churned out and vigorously debated.

As IPCC reports set their sights on the not-too-distant future, a wide range of researchers and activists have been turning, perhaps counterintuitively, to the past. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project (2019) presents a reframing of US history, placing the long history of slavery at the center of the country’s national narrative. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s bestselling The Dawn of Everything (2021) turns to the origins of humanity to unearth the diverse forms of social organization that preceded the rise of capitalism, with the audacious aim of figuring out “how we got stuck.” In the environmental humanities and social sciences, academics are fighting over the presumed origins of the contemporary climate, environmental, and extinction crises, questioning the appropriate name and time scale of our geological epoch. At the same time, people are tearing down colonial and Confederate monuments, integrating histories of injustice and rebellion into school curricula, calling for offensively named places to be renamed, and fighting for the repatriation of cultural artifacts stolen by imperialists centuries ago.

Natural history’s institutions have become key symbolic targets in this widespread reckoning, not least because they put colonial violence on full display. Not only do many natural history museums still contain offensive and racist dioramas and displays constructed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but, as currently constituted, their legitimacy owes everything to the past and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous Peoples, both their material cultures and, across the Americas, their stolen lands. On the one hand, natural history museums can be considered monuments to colonialism, landmarks that function to naturalize capitalist and colonial relations to the world. On the other hand, recent counter-tours at major museums in London and New York City show that museums can also serve as training grounds for seeing from an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist perspective.

As daily news headlines remind us that the future of planetary life is in peril, it may be tempting to see the contemporary struggles over historical markers, events, monuments, and museums as distractions from the main event. It is clear that some camps seek refuge in the past, finding comfort in a projected return to an original state of nature, while others are looking to atone for some original sin. However, there are others, still, who are not looking for salvation, but for alternate traditions, lessons, tools, and epistemologies that might be reworked and mobilized in our struggles for a just and livable world.

This edition of Periscope emerges from this latter tendency, making a case for how history, and natural history in particular, can help orient contemporary struggles for life beyond extraction. To this end, contributors have been asked to engage with a new critical concept, red natural history, which names a tradition of natural history that is not built on colonial or capitalist relations, but on a comradely and reciprocal relation to land, life, and labor. As a perspective and a praxis, red natural history seeks to hold together an insurgency of scientists, scholars, and communities, whose individual and collective practices seek to leverage natural history’s disciplines, methods, tools, and institutional resources in support of contemporary struggles for climate and environmental justice.

What is Red Natural History?

This edition of Periscope was edited by Not An Alternative, a collective of artists, activists, and theorists that has spent most of the past decade developing The Natural History Museum (2014-), a traveling museum that leverages the power of history, museums, monuments, and movements to change narratives, build alliances, educate the public, and drive civic engagement in support of community-led movements for climate and environmental justice. This ongoing project started from the hypothesis that science and natural history museums are not monolithic totalities fully determined by their imperialist foundations or the capitalist interests that they have historically served. Instead, they are collective infrastructures riven with internal divisions. Our initial goal was to organize an insurgency within the US sector for science and natural history museums—to take the sector as a site of struggle, with the aim of seizing some of its institutional resources to support ongoing movements and campaigns.

From the beginning, it was clear to us that there were radicals working in natural history’s disciplines and institutions—scientists, scholars, and educators—who did not want to passively trace the slow degradation of the planet, but to actively get in the way, whether by working directly with communities to expose the impact of industrial pollution on public health, protecting sacred objects or human remains in the path of proposed pipelines, or sounding the alarm about the systemic causes of climate change. We went to conferences with anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, natural scientists, conservationists, and museum curators, where we were introduced to the range of engaged research practices, radical working groups, and advocacy initiatives that scholars and scientists have developed to support community-led and place-based environmental struggles. While often marginalized within their disciplinary associations, and encouraged to compete among themselves for scarce resources, such initiatives represent an emergent tendency within natural history, which Not An Alternative believes can be organized into a powerful infrastructure for community-led movements.

After working for several years to organize alongside scientists, archaeologists, and museum workers, it has become clear to Not An Alternative and many of our comrades that to represent a position of difference, the many dispersed and largely atomized insurgents within natural history’s disciplines and institutions would do well to both name and organize around an alternate tradition of natural history. This dossier is part of our effort to propose a name for this other tradition, and to work out some of the theoretical foundations and practical applications that might give it substance and meaning.

Our proposal is that red natural history can serve as the name for the array of practices and perspectives that fall under the purview of natural history but break from its dominant imperialist tradition.

**Why Red?**

The “red” of red natural history names the Other to natural history as it is conventionally understood, the part of natural history that neither capitalism nor colonialism can capture or put to use. As part of the language in commonthat ties together communist, socialist, and Indigenous traditions of resistance, “red” does not signify a stable identity, but a common alienation from the capitalist world.

In the Indigenous tradition, the term “red” was historically understood as a derogatory slur, meant to racialize Indigenous Peoples and differentiate them from white settlers in North America. With the Red Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the color was reclaimed as an affirmative signifier of Indigenous cultural identity. From the American Indian Movement’s use of the red logo on its flag, to the Indigenous climate justice movement’s reference to Mother Earth’s “red line,” to the red handprints and red dresses that powerfully assert the unjustly ignored epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, to recent political programs like the Red Deal, red has had a central place in the language in common of Indigenous movements within and beyond North America for more than a half-century.

In the socialist tradition, the color red has also been a key means of differentiating comrades from enemies. From the common deployment of the red wedge, red star, and red sunset in international communist art and propaganda to the use of red bandanas by striking workers in the early US labor movement, “red” has been a central part of the language through which the international workers of the world have communicated their struggles for liberation.

The relationship between Indigenous and socialist or communist reds is not simply analogical. Not only did Marx and Engels take inspiration from Iroquois modes of life and forms of social organization, but socialist ideology has been crucial for many decolonial movements across the world, from the liberation struggles of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde (1963-1974), to those of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico (1994- ). These entanglements speak to the ways in which people have worked together to engage, renew, and weave together multiple ways of knowing and traditions of thought and action in their collective emancipatory struggles. They also remind us that there are real reasons why during the so-called “red scares” of the past two centuries, Indigenous Peoples, communists, anarchists, and the dispossessed and exploited peoples of the world have been lumped together, treated as part of one coordinated conspiracy to overthrow capitalism.

In positing the existence of “Red Natural History,” our hope is to inspire others to draw from the many traditions of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist thought and action to advance a natural history worthy of the name.

About This Dossier

This edition of Periscope was inspired by the hypothesis that natural history is not completely determined by its colonial or imperialist traditions. Rather, natural history as it has come to be known is the enclosure and instrumentalization of a much broader project with diverse (and not exclusively European) origins. For our part, Not An Alternative broadly defines natural history as the project of seeing, relating to, and coming to understand the material world. There are ways of relating to the world as a wealth of natural resources, and ways of relating to the world as a world in common that cannot be enclosed. Red natural history names the project of seeing, relating to, and understanding the world as a world in common. Our collective introduced this concept in “Towards a Theory of Red Natural History,” published in Society & Space last May, outlining red natural history as a speculative project—a framework to elaborate a tradition from which the world beyond the capitalist world can be made to appear.

If natural history is a mode of seeing, presenting, and tracing the forces that have produced the world we live in, it is by definition partial and partisan. One objective of red natural history is to train ourselves to see from the perspective of the part that the dominant tradition of natural history has systematically barred from view. Red natural history is attuned to the forces, both human and other-than-human, that heighten the contradictions through which change becomes possible, the forms of more-than-human comradeship that sustain the threat to the capitalist world system. It reveals the untold people’s histories of insurrections, mutinies, strikes, and rebellions as plots co-produced with the land, water, and animal, outlining how people work with their environments in their struggles for justice and liberation just as they have historically leveraged the most exploitative labor conditions to produce the oppositional power they need. The stories that might be chronicled by red natural history attend to storms, fires, rebellions, and egalitarian lifeways in equal measure—to all signs of abundance that betray the enclosures violently imposed upon the world in common.

This dossier brings together Indigenous historians, geographers, and knowledge keepers with non-Indigenous scholars, theorists, and artists to engage with red natural history, not as a fully formed concept, but as a field of inquiry. It should be stressed, however, that this field of inquiry is not open-ended. It is grounded in a shared commitment to the struggle for collective liberation. The essays follow their own paths, but point toward four central theses:

1. Natural history is split. Just as there is an imperialist tradition of natural history, there is another, non-colonial tradition of natural history, which can be made visible through practices of interpretation. Describing the case of a Kaapoisaamiiksi (a headdress traditionally worn by Amskapi Piikani women) in the Field Museum’s collection, Rosalyn LaPier demonstrates how objects of natural history are never completely enclosed, even as they are bought, sold, and subject to display in the world’s most powerful natural history museums. For LaPier, the material cultures of Indigenous Nations are neither conduits to a precolonial ideal, nor are they simple artifacts of dispossession. They tell a complex history of both dispossession and resilience, revealing violent economies of extraction, but also a system of relations that is illegible to the settler-colonial gaze—an Indigenous world, where things are done differently. Andrew Curley turns to the history of the Dilophosaurus wetherilli, a dinosaur skeleton found by a Diné man on the Navajo Nation in 1940, only to be confiscated by paleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley two years later. Curley compels us to see the imperialist tradition of natural history as a grounded practice built on expropriation and Indigenous erasure, but he also offers, through his interpretation of the Dilophosaurus, a blueprint for another kind of natural history: one that situates its objects within the long history of struggle against colonial dispossession.

2. Red natural history insists on the power of history writing in the practice of history making, precisely by developing narrative arcs that orient contemporary struggles for social and environmental justice. It does not seek to understand the world as it exists (appealing to some illusory neutrality), but to take the past as a source for building consciousness and collective political will. In this sense, red natural history participates in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (following Raymond Williams) describes as the “selection and re-selection of ancestors,” from which traditions of resistance are made and remade. In his contribution to this dossier, Ashley Dawson turns to the anarchist tradition to identify, in both human and other-than-human systems, a primordial commonality that runs against the logic of predation governing the capitalist world. He draws on Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid to elaborate a dissenting tradition of biology, which, in emphasizing the role of cooperation in species evolution, opposed the dominant nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century understanding of evolution as a “struggle of each against all.”

3. Red natural history has the capacity to orient movements within and against the university. As a practice of seeing, interpreting, and relating to the world, red natural history extends a broad net over a range of academic disciplines, suggesting the need for both self-criticism and transformation in the sciences, social sciences, and the practical fields of landscape architecture, planning, and design. Kai Bosworth explores the tradition of radical geography, which emerged in the 1960s as an answer to geography’s imperialist legacy, asking what radical geography can do to not only redress geography’s past wrongdoings, but also actively contribute to contemporary struggles for environmental justice. Natchee Blu Barnd elaborates how ethnic studies might be conceived as a branch of red natural history, showing how, as the study of difference and differentiation conducted from the perspective of the oppressed, ethnic studies embodies the antithesis of the imperial tradition of natural history. Billy Fleming turns to landscape architecture and the design professions, asking how designers and landscape architects can forge alliances with insurgent movements for climate and environmental justice. He surveys the work of the Designing a Green New Deal studio, which he runs at the University of Pennsylvania, giving a sense of how design education might be shaped around the imperatives of red natural history, most directly by training students to produce tools that can be put to use in regional struggles.

4. Red natural history is not simply a critical project. It is a constructive, affirmative one, which seeks to find, in the gaps of the capitalist world, the signposts of another world, and from this other world, another natural history. Alberto Acosta argues that the Andean concept of buen vivir offers a vision of another world that is incommensurate with the capitalist world, proposing a combination of tactics and struggles that might bring about the “pluriverse,” which is a term that Indigenous activists and communists in Latin America are organizing around to signal a break from the Western tradition of global development. Dina Gilio-Whitaker writes from a hundred years in the future, and like Acosta, she insists that mass extinction is not guaranteed. Starting from the hypothesis that there is no future without decolonization, she works backwards to imagine the shifts that must take place to turn against the tides of climate catastrophe. Gilio-Whitaker joins with others in the Periscope dossier to insist on the power of revisiting the past from the perspective of a future where justice prevails.

The contributions to this edition of Periscope come together in their resolute commitment not to historicism—to seeing things “as they really were”—but to the constructive project of seeing in (natural) history the opening from which another world has always existed—a world in common that is built and sustained through reciprocal relations between people, animals, and the land. This is not a conclusive statement on what red natural history is and does. More than anything else, it is an invitation to others to join in the struggle to determine the pathways through which the red in natural history can come into view.

–Steve Lyons for Not an Alternative

Not An Alternative (est. 2004) is a collective that works at the intersection of art, activism, and theory. The collective’s latest, ongoing project is The Natural History Museum (2014–), a traveling museum that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature. The Natural History Museum collaborates with Indigenous communities, environmental justice organizations, scientists, and museum workers to create new narratives about our shared history and future, with the goal of educating the public, influencing public opinion, and inspiring collective action.

“Red Natural History: An Introduction” was originally published in Periscope: Red Natural History, Social Text (online, February 28, 2023).

The world is in flames. From California and Oregon to Australia and the Amazon rainforest, the largest fires on record are spreading across the planet, bathing their surrounds in an unsettling red light for days at a time. Floods, droughts, hurricanes, deadly heat waves, and other climate-fueled disasters are tearing across the landscape. The Gulf Stream is on the brink of collapse. The predictive models of modern science no longer point to stable patterns, but to the volatile force of the unknown.

Not An Alternative, *Red Specter*, still from 3D animation in progress, 2020-21. Image: Not An Alternative.

The combined history of colonialism and capitalism has been marked by the unceasing effort to control the human and nonhuman forces that threaten to bring about its end. Climate change is only the latest threat, but it is unrivaled in its power to transform the world. The incapacity of science, states, and corporations to manage the threat of climate change is forcing a crisis in the colonial regime of knowledge that underpins capitalism—the groundwork of the tradition of natural history that emerged from the social institution of modern science and the political project of imperialism over the last three centuries.

This text introduces a perspective that interprets natural history neither simply as the study of “nature,” ecosystems, or premodern cultural traditions, nor as an intrinsically colonial enterprise, but as a history of struggle between two incommensurate relations to the world: one governed by a logic of extraction and enclosure and another that relates to the world as a world in common that cannot be enclosed. This struggle is not waged on the terrain of the natural, but over its interpretation, not over what is “intrinsically in nature” (Gould, 1988), but over the relation to the world that ought to be naturalized.

Naturalizing the Capitalist World

From Europe, to China, to the Indo-Islamic world, long traditions of natural history have emerged, and sometimes converged, over the course of human history. But by most accounts (Raj, 2007; Basalla, 1967), natural history is understood as the sole dominion of the West—as a project that emanated outward from the colonial metropoles to survey the entire world with the empiricist tools of modern science. The first large-scale natural history museums and botanical gardens were established in Europe and Great Britain to put this project on display. There, biological and geological specimens, premodern cultural artifacts, human and nonhuman remains, and other “curiosities” bought and stolen by explorers and colonists were submitted as material evidence for scientific investigation.

In its institutionalized form, the imperial project of natural history constructed a picture of the world through the spoils of imperialist expansion. Its collections demonstrated the military power of the metropole, and its methodologies for interpreting these collections asserted the supremacy of Western empiricism and modern science. This tradition of natural history rested on the assumption that experts could understand the world by extracting and studying its constitutive parts. It claimed its object as an individuated, knowable thing, part of the wealth of natural resources available for possession, profit, and scientific probing.

This basic premise came to prominence through Charles Darwin’s theses on evolutionary biology, which grafted a Malthusian logic of individual competition onto the world as a whole. According to this logic, organisms and their environments are not seen to be mutually dependent; rather, as Richard Lewontin (1991) explains, in the Darwinist evolutionary struggle “organisms find the world as it is, and they must either adapt or die.” Generations of conservative economists appropriated Darwin’s theory of natural selection to explain the dynamics of competitive advantage under capitalism, rationalizing capitalist domination as an evolutionary fact. The “survival of the fittest” thesis, proposed not by Darwin but by the social Darwinist philosopher Herbert Spencer, galvanized the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which, unsurprisingly, found vigorous support from the world’s most influential natural history museums. The dominant ideology of natural history, which embedded both the logic of competition and the violence of extraction into the project of scientific inquiry, served to reinforce social Darwinism’s capitalist and white-supremacist conclusions.

Illustration of cranial types from Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon’s *Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History* (1854). (c) Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.‍

All in the name of science, lands were torn up, bodies were exhumed, and skulls were examined, compared, and classified according to racist typologies. The living subjects of ethnographic study, too, were cast as primitive and prehistoric, banished from the historical time of the ethnographer (Fabian, 1983). “Objects for observation,” Vine Deloria, Jr. (1969: 81) argued, were always implicitly “considered objects for experimentation, for manipulation, and for eventual extinction.” Prioritizing the physical materialism of the world and its ecosystems, natural historians submitted everything sacred to the profane logic of equivalence—the law of capitalist exchange. In this and other ways, natural history was part of a broader plot to remap the world as a capitalist world, to turn what John Locke (1689) called the “wild Common of Nature” into a source of profit.

The microscope is only one of many tools deployed in the ongoing project of naturalizing the capitalist world. By means of violent dispossession, deceitful and broken treaties, and the declaration of terra nullius, territories collectively held for generations by peasants, Indigenous peoples, and maroon communities were, and continue to be, stolen, enclosed, and submitted to the abstract logics of private property. Through the legal abstraction of land titling, territories were commoditized and made fungible—leveraged as credit, exchanged, and subjected to financial speculation in a world market (Bhandar, 2018: 97). It is not that the transition to capitalism catapulted idyllic premodern cultures into history, undoing some illusory primordial innocence as traditional anthropology and historiography would have it, but that in recoding land as property, collective systems of land tenure based on kinship, intergenerational stewardship, spiritual value, or communal labor have been rendered both illegitimate and illegible—from the capitalist point of view. Displaced and dispossessed, people around the world have been put to work, forced to toil not for the land and each other, but for capital.

Haunting Natural History

This ongoing process of enclosure and expropriation, which Marxists call “primitive accumulation,” has not only been a means of asserting sovereign rule over Indigenous land and establishing capitalist economic relations in new territories, but also a means of repressing preexisting modes of life, knowledge systems, and land-based practices that cannot be reconciled with the demands of colonialism or capitalism. Agrarian commons, subsistence farms, systems of mutual aid, and Indigenous practices of land and water stewardship share one thing in common: an insistence that the world is not a resource to be extracted, but, as Glen Sean Coulthard (2013: 60) puts it, part of a system of reciprocal relations and obligations between humans and nonhumans that demands mutual respect, non-domination, and nonexploitation. Writing about the land-based practices that structure the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism in North America, Coulthard (2013: 13) names this perspective “grounded normativity,” underscoring how Indigenous struggles for land are also deeply informed by the land. The ethics of reciprocity, which is differently expressed in Indigenous and non-Indigenous traditions of resistance, is not a straightforward inversion of the colonial logic of extraction and enclosure. It does not simply subordinate human life to the lives of animals, plants, water, and land. Rather, it underscores how their interests are bound together in the production and reproduction of life.

During and after the transition to capitalism, collectivist societies across the world, even within Europe itself, have struggled within and against their conditions of survival to build alternative knowledge systems from their own embodied experiences, clarifying and sharpening place-based traditions and ways of knowing in and through their collective struggles for liberation. In the paranoid minds of the capitalists, these constructed traditions, knowledge systems, and world-building practices are not only incompatible with the colonial logic of extraction; they also represent its combative antithesis, expressing what nineteenth-century crowd psychologist Gustav Le Bon (1897: xvi) characterizes as an emotional, unreasoning, and barbaric “primitive communism” that needs to be destroyed.

There have not always been direct material connections between “communistic” peasants, heretics, maroons, women, workers, colonial subjects, and Indigenous peoples, whose appearances have spanned continents and historical periods. These groups have also related to the land they have traversed in distinct and sometimes contradictory ways. Nevertheless, oppressed communities across the world have been perceived by the capitalists as instantiations of one collective body, whose inborn fidelity to the common will, left to itself, bring about capitalism’s end (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000). Faced with the endurance of this capitalist conspiracy, it is no surprise that colonial and capitalist forces continue to brutally attack collectivist societies and the cultures that ground them, specifically targeting the reciprocal relation between peoples, the animals they rely on for their survival, the lands they steward, and the traditions that connect them to their ancestors.

The cover of the Economic League’s *Red Octopus* (1950), depicting an octopus spreading its tentacles across a map of the world. The illustration deploys a visual motif commonly used in anti-communist literature since the 1870s, which equates the deepwater sea creature with the insurgent threat of the “reds.” ‍

So that it could stand as an objective and ideologically neutral authority on the nonhuman world, the imperialist tradition of natural history has served the function of eradicating knowledge systems that it has understood to be in competition. Natural historians have long participated in this project by treating societies they could not understand as barbaric, premodern, and extinct, even as these same societies held their ground and maintained their languages, cultural traditions, and ways of knowing. The modern concept of natural history was thus not only formed on a bedrock of colonialism; it has also required the constitutive exclusion of its other: a natural history built on reciprocity, not extraction. This other natural history was not annihilated, only obscured—symbolically imprisoned in museum vaults and display cases, where it remains as a specter that haunts natural history from within.

‍Red Natural History

This other natural history, in distinct opposition to and in struggle with colonial, capitalist historicization and expropriation, is not simply alternative, peripheral, or marginal to the disciplines, methodologies, institutions, and practices that are usually associated with natural history. Rather, like a repressed trauma, it constitutes the disavowal at the center of natural history and its related disciplines. It is reflected in the life-affirming processes that have been deemed out of control because they refuse to stay within the bounds of privately held allotments: the weeds that settlers try to keep from returning to their manicured lawns; the cyclically returning forest fires that threaten the value of the mansions that get in their way; the surging waters that dams try to hold back; the climate refugees shaking down border walls. Not An Alternative is working with a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists, historians, ethnobotanists, geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists to give a name to this other natural history, which we propose to call Red Natural History.

Red Natural History names a commonality shared between the peoples, worldviews, traditions, and practices that have been the objectified subjects of natural history, taking as axiomatic that the world is not a wealth of natural resources but a world in common. The world in common is not identical to “the commons.” The commons is a territorialized site that can be enclosed, whereas the world in common exceeds every attempt to consume it, make it knowable, or enclose it in the property form. It defines a comradely and reciprocal relation between humans and nonhumans, a relation of mutual obligation that is not naturally occurring, but that is made to exist through the sustained, collective effort to produce it.

For Not An Alternative, the “Red” in Red Natural History designates the divide in natural history, signaling an alignment with those forces that have always been illegible to the colonial regime of knowledge, which represent the dangerous idea that something might exist beyond capitalist management and control. It signals our fidelity with the long history of struggle to make the world a world in common—with the intergenerational movements against enclosure, colonization, exploitation, and extraction that have assembled under the red flag, the red star, the red fist, the red square, and the red line.

On the cover of Lothrop Stoddard’s *The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy* (1920), a trio of gigantic, silhouetted figures charge across a globe, set against the backdrop of a red sunset. The image supplies a clear illustration of the anxiety and terror felt by the colonizing nation-states during a period of intense anti-colonial struggle.

For centuries, the purveyors of colonialism and capitalism have targeted groups that relate to the world as a world in common, waging brutal campaigns of extermination, enclosure, and forced assimilation. These campaigns have been devastating but left incomplete. The world in common, as a relation to the land and the horizon for our politics, comes into view when we hold in our minds the memory of the ancestors who came before us. It is awakened when we recognize how our traditions of resistance (Estes, 2019) open ways of understanding the world that enable us to see differently, when we build on the life-affirming knowledge of past generations, and when we pick up the struggle to protect the world for our descendants.

As a conscious project of “selecting and re-selecting our ancestors” (Gilmore, 2017), Red Natural History asks us to ground contemporary struggles for the land and all its inhabitants in the struggles of those who came before us, to draw a line from the past into a future that capitalism has barred from view. It asks us to build on the revolutionary work of the True Levellers (better known as the Diggers), who in the midst of the English Civil War of 1642–51, dug up the hedges at St. George’s Hill to plant crops for the poor—an act of negation meant to affirm and reveal the world in common beneath the enclosures imposed upon it (Winstanley, 1649). It asks us to learn from the maroons of Dominica, who, having fled from the plantations to the mountains throughout the eighteenth century, held their ground for decades not simply by fortifying their camps, but also by learning from and living with a wild terrain that the French and British armed forces were unable to tame (Malm, 2018: 13-15). It asks us to remember the Guinnean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral (1972), who, leading the guerrilla movement against the Portuguese occupation from 1963 to 1973, declared that on the flat terrain of Guinnea-Bissau, “Our people are our mountains.” It asks us to stand behind the struggles of Indigenous peoples around the world—to bear witness not only to the blockades they build, but also, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes, to “the rich sites of Indigenous life” existing behind them, where “you will witness a radically different political existence and ethical orientation, in spite of the dominance of colonialism.” Red Natural History’s task is not simply to show how people have “made kin” with nonhuman others (Haraway, 2016), but to build from the long and ongoing history of reciprocity in struggle. The point is not to chronicle a linear history, to get the facts right, but to see past and present struggles as part of one movement to decisively shift the direction of natural history, from progressive degradation to abundance and collective flourishing.

Our collective’s understanding of Red Natural History is inspired by a long history of anticolonial struggle, but, to be clear, it is not based on a neo-primitivist imaginary. It does not look to the past to discover an authentic, precolonial ideal, but to build on the power of those who, throughout history, have struggled to maintain reciprocal relations in the world. It sees tradition as something that is invented, worked on, put to use, and transformed in the intergenerational movement to secure just relations with the land and each other. While the future is not behind us, the accumulated history of struggle empowers and guides us in our collective work.

The work of Red Natural History is to force the dialectics of natural history into the open. To see dialectically is to see the split in the totality, the dynamic contradictions through which historical change is made. The operative division in natural history is not between the human and nonhuman, as the New Materialists argue, nor is it between nature and society, as in the writing of Jason W. Moore (2015). Rather, it is between two fundamentally irreconcilable perspectives on the world: one that sees the world as a wealth of natural resources and the other that sees the presence of the world in common within and beyond every enclosure. These perspectives enforce distinct relations between humans and nonhumans—reciprocal or extractive—and, as a consequence, different obligations—to the reproduction of life, or the reproduction of capital. To see natural history through this schema is to register the divisions through which the world itself transforms, not in the interest of healing the divide, but of taking a side: oppressor or oppressed, extraction or reciprocity, individual or collective, enclosure or common. When we take the side of the common, we open a path for new alliances, not through the intersection of identities, but through a shared relation to the world. As a mode of seeing historical change, Red Natural History mobilizes its adherents as a divisive force—within, against, and towards an emancipatory future.

How, then, do we relate to the signs telling us that the world we live in is coming to an end? Do we stand by in horror, interpreting the storms touching down with increasing fury as evidence that there is no alternative to mass extinction? Do we rest assured that big tech will save the capitalist world from ruin? Or do we interpret the arrival of the storm as a sign that the red specter has awakened to support the oppressed people of the world in their efforts to plot the only path forward?

The ongoing and accelerating effects of climate change have launched the planet into a perpetual state of emergency, but the meaning of this emergency is not locked in. As a perspective and a praxis, Red Natural History urges those of us who take the side of the common to see ourselves as part of the storm that arrives from the past, not to produce chaos, but to rupture the status quo, draw capitalism’s structural violence and injustices into the open, and orient our struggles for a livable and egalitarian future for all.

References

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Bhandar B (2018). Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership.Durham: Duke University Press.

Cabral A (1972). Our People are Our Mountains: Amilcar Cabral on the Guinean Revolution. London: Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola & Guine.

Coulthard GS (2013) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deloria V Jr (1969) Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: MacMillan.

Estes N (2019). Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Brooklyn: Verso.

Fabian J (1983) Time and The Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gilmore RW (2017). Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence. In Johnson GT and Lubin A (eds) Futures of Black Radicalism. Brooklyn: Verso.

Gould SJ (1988) Kropotkin Was No Crackpot. Natural History 97(7): 12–21.

Haraway D (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, Duke University Press.

Kapil R (2007) Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Le Bon G (1897) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. 2nd Edition. New York: MacMillan.

Lewontin RC (1991) Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. Concord: Canada Broadcasting Corporation and House of Anasi Press.

Linebaugh P and Redkier M (2000). The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press.

Locke J (1689) Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Malm A (2018). In Wildness Is the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature. Historical Materialism 26(3): 3-37.

Moore JW (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Brooklyn: Verso.

Simpson, LB (2021). A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.

Winstanley G (1649). The True Levellers Standard Advance: Or, The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men.

Not An Alternative (est. 2004) is a collective that works at the intersection of art, activism, and theory. The collective’s latest, ongoing project is The Natural History Museum (2014–), a traveling museum that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature. The Natural History Museum collaborates with Indigenous communities, environmental justice organizations, scientists, and museum workers to create new narratives about our shared history and future, with the goal of educating the public, influencing public opinion, and inspiring collective action.

“Towards a Theory of Red Natural History” was originally published in Society & Space (May 11, 2022).

Across the United States and around the world, monuments to racists and genocidal colonists are being toppled, thrown into rivers, vandalized, and quietly removed. Responses to these actions vary widely. Some on the left celebrate them as meaningful acts of refusal. Others disregard them as merely symbolic gestures, acts of erasure that obscure the terrain of struggle, making people feel like they’re changing something without changing anything at all. On the other side of the political divide, right-wing conspiracists interpret monument removals, the integration of “critical race theory” into educational curricula, open borders for refugees, and Indigenous land claims over privately-owned and federal lands as part of one coordinated movement to eliminate the white race—a conspiracy that some call “the Great Replacement.”

If the narrative of a Great Replacement has been a rallying cry for the far right—a highly effective means of driving a division between ethnonationalist patriots and the forces, tendencies, and movements that undermine their “sovereign claim to the land,” the left has thus far not directly answered to the charge. While it may be tempting to disregard the right’s conspiracy as a paranoid fantasy, there is another option. The left can take advantage of it—by defining what it is fighting to replace, and what with.

This text is the first in a two-part essay series, which enters this ideological struggle from the left. As members of Not An Alternative (NAA), a collective that has spent the past eight years intervening within the sector for science and natural history museums in the United States under the generic name The Natural History Museum, our focus is on the disciplines and institutions broadly associated with natural history. What would it mean to replace the dominant tradition of natural history, which emerged from colonialism and enforces a capitalist relation to the world, and what might such a replacement open up for the left?

Not An Alternative, Mining the HMNS: An Investigation by The Natural History Museum, 2016. The eponymous exhibition, held at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas, interrogated the symbiotic relationship between the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences and its corporate sponsors. The exhibition analyzed key narratives and displays in the Houston museum, highlighting the voices and stories that were excluded – those of the low-income Latinx fence-line communities along the Houston Ship Channel. Photo: Not An Alternative / The Natural History Museum.

As part of this investigation, NAA is working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists, historians, ethnobotanists, geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists to define and organize around a counter-tradition of natural history, a Red Natural History, which sees the world not as a wealth of natural resources available for possession or profit, but as a world in common that cannot be enclosed. This first text situates this inquiry within NAA’s history of practice, telling the story of how we came to believe it is necessary to name and organize around an alternate tradition of natural history. The second delves into the question at hand, sketching out our collective’s provisional definition of Red Natural History.

The Museum Divide

Established in 2004, NAA is a collective of artists, activists, and theorists with a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, institutions, and history. We have worked shoulder to shoulder with homelessness and anti-eviction activists, Occupy Wall Street organizers, environmental justice advocates, climate scientists, and Indigenous organizers, engaging their struggles not through a typical head-on (or head-butt) approach, but through the occupation and redeployment of popular vernacular, symbols, and institutional forms. Our persistent goal, as much as aiming to challenge the right’s grip on power, has been to challenge the left to step into its own power. We have argued that without a strong organizational infrastructureand a language in common, left counterpower is very difficult to build and sustain. Without these resources, the left finds itself continuously starting from scratch, seemingly building from nothing other than the experience of co-optation and defeat.

As the right has spent billions of dollars seizing institutions for its ideological agenda—taking over the leadership of everything from public school boards to major museums—much of the radical left has abandoned such spaces, arguing that left counterpower should be built in the streets. For this camp, institutionality is assumed to be inherently conservative. In our collective’s analysis, this position has contributed to a strengthened and emboldened right, which has embedded itself within the concrete structures and infrastructures through which people learn to relate to the world, and a demoralized left, which tends to see its failures at the expense of what it has achieved.

After a decade pushing for the development of a coherent visual language for the left—which NAA saw begin to coalesce, and then saw disappear, in our involvement with the eruption and disintegration of the Occupy movement—we founded The Natural History Museum (NHM), an experiment that aimed to model a left answer to the right’s institutional takeovers. The NHM was founded both as an intervention on the US sector for science and natural history museums and an institution in and of itself, an experiment in enlisting the museum as part of a communicative infrastructure for the climate and environmental justice movements. NAA’s hypothesis was that for museums to help pave the way towards a more just and sustainable future, they would need to not simply represent environmental injustice, but be rebuilt around the movements that are struggling against it.

Not An Alternative/The Natural History Museum, Will the Story of the 6th Mass Extinction Ever Include the Role of its Sponsors? (2015). Diorama installed at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Convention in Atlanta, depicting the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing at the American Museum of Natural History in New York several hundred years into a dystopian future. Photo: Not An Alternative/The Natural History Museum.

We started with a series of campaigns that aimed to split some of the country’s largest natural history museums from the industry interests they served. In the first of these campaigns, we enlisted dozens of the world’s top scientists and Nobel laureates to stand behind an open letter to the museum sector calling on all museums to cut ties with fossil fuel interests. We made a target of fossil fuel oligarch and climate science obfuscator David H. Koch, who for 23 years had held a position on the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, one of the country’s largest natural history museums. Following dozens of news stories and more than 550,000 petition signatures, Koch quietly stepped down from his position at the AMNH—a monument toppled. Koch, in our calculus, was low hanging fruit, a symbolic target that could be leveraged to draw out comrades inside the museum sector with whom we could advance shared aims. In the Koch campaign, as well as other campaigns against corporate sponsors, fossil fuel investments, and right-wing funders of science denial, our aim was not to make museums like the AMNH better, but to activate an internal split—to reveal, in their internal contradictions, a kernel from which to build a left alternative.

Beyond the Museum

It was during the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock that our scope began to expand. When the Dakota Access Pipeline company bulldozed sites sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, with the suspected aim of obliterating evidence of Traditional Cultural Properties before they could be officially designated by the federal government, it became evident that archeology, oral history, and other building blocks of “natural history” as it was conventionally understood could become crucial components of a pipeline struggle. Asked for support by Native Organizers Alliance, an Indigenous-led community organizing network, we leveraged relationships built over the previous two years to issue a public letter condemning the desecration, which was ultimately signed by more than 1400 archeologists, anthropologists, historians, and museum workers.

If our initial aim was to enter the struggle for environmental justice from the side, through the mediating apparatus of the museum, the conflict over archaeological and cultural resources at Standing Rock made it clear that some of the most consequential struggles over natural history were taking place not in museums, but on the land. Natural history was not just in the museum; it was also in the ground, standing as a bulwark against extraction.

Out of our collective’s long-term intervention within and beyond the natural history museum, we have come to the analysis that it is not the museum, but natural history itself, that needs to be split—a conceptual shift that allows for a radical reimagination of what institutional forms can best support collective emancipatory struggles. The museum is one apparatus that can be used to teach people to see the world in common that exists beyond and beneath the capitalist world, but there are others: Tribal Historic Preservation Offices, environmental justice think-tanks, progressive science associations, citizen science labs, journals like Society & Space, and so on.

Drawing a Red Line

Since 2017, NAA has been working primarily in solidarity and in collaboration with Indigenous communities in North America, most deeply with the House of Tears Carvers of the Lummi Nation. For more than a decade, the House of Tears Carvers has been carving totem poles, putting them on flatbed trailers, and bringing them to communities across North America to build alliances in the struggle to protect the land and water for the generations to come. The totem pole journeys visit Indigenous communities, farmers and ranchers, scientists, and faith-based communities, engaging groups in ceremonies led by Lummi elders. At each ceremony, participants are invited to touch the totem pole—to give it their prayers and power, and to receive its power in turn. The goal of the totem pole journeys is to connect communities on the frontlines of environmental struggle, and to build, through ceremony, a collective that did not previously exist—invoking generations past, present, and future. Lummi councilman Freddie Lane likened the totem poles to batteries: they are charged with the energy of those who touch them, and as they travel, they give the people energy in turn.

Our first projects with our Lummi comrades sought to leverage mainstream museums as communications infrastructures for their campaigns, which we experimented with in special exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Florida Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Our latest collaboration, the Red Road to DC, was a sort of exhibit that traveled across the land—a cross-country totem pole journey that aimed to support local communities’ efforts to protect sacred places threatened by dams, mining, and oil and gas extraction. The journey highlighted the critical importance of Tribal Nations in decisions on land, water and infrastructure projects, and demanded that the U.S. government respects the international legal standard of free, prior, and informed consent in its negotiations with Tribal Nations.

The Red Road to DC began at the Lummi Nation, where the tribe is fighting to protect the Salish Sea, orcas, and salmon from tanker traffic and pollution. From there, the pole traveled to Nez Perce territory in Idaho, where tribal leaders are fighting for the removal of four dams on the Lower Snake River, which have had devastating effects on the salmon, as well as the people who rely on fishing for their survival and sustenance. It then went to Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, which was opened to oil and gas extraction by the Trump Administration; and to the Greater Chaco region in New Mexico, where oil companies have been given permits to drill despite the area’s historic cultural importance to the Hopi, Navajo and Pueblo Nations. It then headed north to the sacred Black Hills in South Dakota, where Lakota activists are leading the #Landback campaign with a call to return Mount Rushmore to its original custodians; to the Missouri River and Standing Rock, where the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline remains very much alive; to the rice fields of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where water protectors are fighting to block the construction of the Line 3 Pipeline, which promises to transport nearly a million barrels of tar sands per day from Alberta to Wisconsin; and to Mackinaw City, Michigan, where the Bay Mills Indian Community has been fighting the existing Line 5 pipeline, as well as a plan to build a new pipeline tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac. At the end of the journey, the pole was received by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in Washington D.C. It was ultimately installed at the National Conservation Training Center where it stands as a symbol of Indigenous movements for life against extraction.

While the communities brought together through the totem pole journey are held in common by a shared history of settler-colonial dispossession, forced assimilation, and exploitation, the Red Road to DC foregrounded not the violent conditions they endure, but the sacred world they live to protect. Instead of drawing a black line between oil pipelines, colonial monuments, dams, and other monuments to extraction, the journey traced a red line between sacred sites, insisting on a relationship between people and place that cannot be seen from the capitalist point of view.

Our collective co-produced the Red Road to DC because we imagined it could model a response to the struggles over colonial monuments that have been erupting over the past several years, specifically by building power around a different kind of monument—one that reveals a way of seeing and relating to the world that is fundamentally irreconcilable with capitalism. Situated within a wider landscape of activist mobilization that includes struggles to change place names, to remove colonial monuments, to integrate anti-racist narratives into school curricula, to decolonize museums and repatriate stolen objects, and to return land to Tribal Nations, the Red Road to DC could be seen to be part of the Great Replacement that the right-wing conspiracists fear: a movement to destroy the myth of settler indigeneity that the United States was built on—of the “natural” right of the property-owning class of white settlers to the land and everything that can be extracted from it—and with it, the capitalist system that this myth enshrines.

For NAA, the Red Road to DC modeled a non-capitalist and anti-colonial practice of natural history, a natural history that gets its energy from the movements to support collective life and gives these movements energy in turn; a natural history that points to the world beyond capitalism and takes the side of the common. As a first step toward building out and organizing around this alternative, our collective has given it a name: Red Natural History.

Defining Red Natural History

After spending eight years organizing within and against the institutions of natural history, we are convinced of the need for a name that defines a partisan project of natural history—a name in common that can hold together the insurgent work of scientists, social scientists, conservationists, communities, and others who are struggling to transform the fields and disciplines broadly associated with natural history.

As we will elaborate in the next essay in this series, our collective defines “natural history” as the ever-unfolding history of life and land. While the dominant, institutionalized tradition of natural history is informed by a colonial logic of extraction, enclosure, and exploitation, we argue that there is another tradition of natural history, built not on colonial or capitalist relations, but on a comradely and reciprocal relation to land, life, and labor.

For us, the “Red” of Red Natural History does not only suggest a relationship to the history of Indigenous struggle, but also to the “red threat” that terrifies the right, the red flags that have been waived by revolutionaries around the world for centuries, and the red alerts issued by climate scientists to warn of the storms to come. In our interpretation, Red Natural History is not just a proposal for charting alternate histories of natural history, but also for embracing the right’s fantasy of left power. It is also a call for the left to search for the ancestors, irrespective of their identities, whose emancipatory struggles live on in the contemporary movements to remake the world as a world in common.

Our collective’s perspective on Red Natural History is one of many that will be shared over the next year, as we have been working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous scientists, scholars, and practitioners to publish a dossier of speculative essays that give meaning to the term. The point of this collaborative investigation is not to reach consensus, but to create energy around the term Red Natural History, to signal a gravitational pull from the critique of the imperialist tradition of natural history to the positive articulation of another—a tradition of natural history that can rise to the challenges of today’s overlapping and intensifying social, climate, and extinction emergencies.

Our hope is that Red Natural History does not remain an abstract concept, but that it has an effect on practice—that it provides a framework that insurgents from fields associated with natural history (including archaeology, anthropology, geography, history, ecology, and so on) can use to articulate what they share in common as they struggle to leverage their institutions’ resources to support the communities that are leading efforts to protect natural and cultural heritage, block extractivist projects, and point the way to a just and livable future for all.

“Coming Out the Other Side: Notes on an Eight-Year Expedition into Natural History” was originally published in Society & Space (May 9, 2022).

As part of the group exhibition “Overground Resistance” curated by Oliver Ressler at frei_raum Q21 exhibition space, the artist collective Not An Alternative present their project The Natural History Museum.This conversation between Steve Lyons and Oliver Ressler presented here in shortened and edited form, took place around the conference “Barricading the Ice Sheets” at Camera Austria in Graz in February 2020.

Oliver Ressler: Can you talk about the most important aspects of your artistic praxis? How did it develop?

Steve Lyons: I work with Not An Alternative, a collective of artists, theorists, and activists in the United States. Our current and ongoing project is The Natural History Museum (NHM). The NHM is both an officially accredited museum of natural history and an activist organization, which we founded in 2014 as an experiment on the U.S. sector for science and natural history museums. Our idea was to occupy the museum form in order to enter the museum sector as a kind of Trojan horse. Building on the work of our comrades at Liberate Tate, our first projects and campaigns used the museum as a platform to get climate change obfuscationists and fossil fuel oligarchs dropped from the boards of trustees of some of the largest science museums in the country. Since 2017, we have developed ongoing collaborations with Indigenous communities and organizations that are working on the frontlines of the climate crisis, with the aim of leveraging museums as communications platforms for their struggles and campaigns.

Not An Alternative, Mining the HMNS: An Investigation by The Natural History Museum, 2016. © The Natural History Museum

Oliver Ressler: How would you describe the role of artists within the climate justice movement? How do you see them and how do you wish it would be?

Steve Lyons: We think it’s important to make a distinction between artists and cultural producers. One of the challenges of thinking about how artists can engage within the culture of social movements is that the concept of art comes with a lot of baggage. The dominant tradition of contemporary art is entirely compatible with the ideology of bourgeois individualism. In this tradition, art is largely imagined to transcend the everyday, valuing novelty and creativity over political efficacy. And we see this within the structure of the art world, not only in the United States, but globally. A few members of Not An Alternative went to art school, but not the majority. We see ourselves as cultural producers, and see the broader framework of cultural production to be a more generative framework to think about the kind of work that we do, as well as the kind of creative political work that people do within the context of social movements.

As a collective, we have historically avoided attributing our individual names to any given project. We are organized as a collective – so we work together, as a group – but, more importantly, our work is geared toward the production of collectivity. It’s worth emphasizing that culture, in the anthropological sense of the term, has always been central to the formation of collectives. Cultural forms and practices produce social bonds, allowing people to distinguish their comrades from their enemies. They are also the means by which collectives express counterpower. As cultural producers, we work on the terrain of culture (again, in the anthropological sense) to build, expand, and sharpen the language in common that holds us together as a “we.”

TEJAS “Toxic Tour” Hologram Mini-Diorama, HD, 6 min, 2016 © The Natural History Museum

Oliver Ressler: Jay Jordan in the abstract for his talk for the conference “Barricading the Ice Sheets” uses the term of “extractivist art”. Is an activist art “extractivist”, if it takes place in an art institutional context?

Steve Lyons: That’s a loaded question! Of course I can think of numerous examples of artists who have a parasitic relationship to social movements, who are more invested in trading on political righteousness than with the building of collective power. But does every practice that locates itself within cultural institutions need to be extractivist? I don’t think so. The history of creative activism within museums that we associate with the tradition of institutional critique – the Art Workers’ Coalition in New York comes to mind – runs against the grain of what JJ is calling “extractivist.” In this tradition, art institutions are taken as backdrops and sites from which people have come together to engage in anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist struggle. Since the 1960s, there have been numerous instances, including some that JJ has been involved in, where artists have seized cultural infrastructures as resources and platforms for political struggle.

Does the activist intervention offer credibility to the institution, giving it a veneer of authenticity? Or does it add value to a social movement or campaign? Does it activate the institution as a site of political struggle or force a decision? Of course, some projects do all of these things, since working within and against is always, necessarily, contradictory. But I think, for example, that the groups associated with BP or Not BP and Liberate Tate in the UK, who are working on fossil fuel divestment and sponsorship campaigns in London, are doing a really great job of working within museums, but against the interest that these museums were built to serve. Not An Alternative is also working between social movements and museums. We are not satisfied with our work unless it is adding to the movement or campaign we’re contributing to. We are constantly asking ourselves if we are contributing to the building of collectivity, strengthening the operative divisions, or producing concrete change that puts our comrades in a better position.

Personally, I don’t think there are any uncomplicated sites of struggle. Whether we’re in a museum or a public square, we’re struggling within and against capitalism. And given the state of the world, I think it’s important that we’re not only working at the margins.

Oliver Ressler: The enormity of the challenge of the climate crisis requires that also the wider art world needs to transform radically. What are central aspects of this transformation from your point of view?

Steve Lyons: Some people would argue that the art world is simply an infrastructure for the production of capital. The art world, in this view, is a complex of art fairs, commercial galleries, and museums, which articulate to produce capital, both through the trade of assets and the production of prestige. Financiers get social benefits from the art world, and artists get symbolic and cultural capital, both of which are at some point, and continually, parlayed into money. One problem with this account is that it doesn’t help us understand what Greg Sholette calls the art world’s “dark matter”: the glut of surplus labor that this complex produces. I think it’s more generative to see the art world from the perspective of contradiction – to see it as an infrastructure that produces class divisions, and which thus creates the conditions for antagonism and struggle. From this vantage, the art world is an infrastructure in which money and power circulate, but also an infrastructure that can be seized.

Take art magazines, for example. Big art magazines like Artforum are currently distributed in ways that represent ruling class tastes while contributing to the value of ruling class collections. But this function is historical and contingent. Art magazines do not need to contribute to the reproduction of ruling class power, and there are plenty of examples of art magazines that don’t. One of the benefits of understanding the art world as something that is internally divided, as a sort of split subject that can be struggled over, is that you can see the means of production and distribution as potential resources for left struggle. This isn’t just hypothetical. It’s happening.

We could consider the recent controversy around Warren Kanders, owner of the weapons manufacturer Safariland and until recently, trustee of the Whitney Museum of American Art. During the last Whitney Biennial, community members and artists mobilized to get Kanders kicked off the board of the museum, seizing the museum and the Biennial as a platform to not only draw attention to Kanders and the brutality his wealth is built on, but also to underscore the complicity of the museum. At a pivotal moment in the campaign, Artforum published an article titled “The Teargas Biennial,” which effectively subordinated the story of the Biennial to the story of the Kanders campaign, making the campaign impossible for the institution to ignore. While there were other factors, including internal divisions within the museum itself, it was only after the bad press that Kanders quickly and quietly stepped down from the board. In this case, we can see that Artforum, the iconic ruling class art magazine, was taken as a platform for a movement’s cause. The Whitney Museum, too, became a site for opposition, collectivization, and renewed politicization among and beyond New York’s art community. This is just one example of how ruling class infrastructures can be hijacked.

Oliver Ressler: I have a question on the use of language: In the northern countries, where winters are cold, for some people the term “global warming” may sound like a reference to something pleasant and desirable. Are there any suggestions concerning the replacement of this term or about the power of language in relation to climate disruption in general?

Steve Lyons: Not An Alternative is invested in using the language that is out there, the language that is being used and that has power. For us it is not a question of substituting one term for another because it is purer or clearer in its descriptive or explanatory capacity. It’s a question of using the term that works. What term is more useful in building collectivity? What are people mobilizing around? Are people rallying around the term “global warming”? Does the term clarify the terrain of struggle? Is it an effective term? If it is, then we use that term, we commit to it and build our work around it.

A good example of how this was active in our practice is when we were working within the Occupy milieu, specifically within Occupy Wall Street. In Oakland, California, there was a major division, pretty quickly after Occupy Oakland began, where a whole subset of the movement came out against the term “Occupy.” “Occupation is the language of the colonizer; we want to Decolonize Oakland!” The movement split in two. For us, while the choice to mobilize around “Occupy” or “Decolonize” opens onto a set of important theoretical questions, from the point of view of practice, the question should actually be much simpler: “What is the term around which counterpower is being built, and in what ways can we build on that?” The point is to expand the collective power that is already there. So that’s a non-answer to your question.

Oliver Ressler: Well, you described quite well why you don’t answer directly.

Where can we glimpse potential futures and new worlds grounded in social justice and ecological flourishing, and how can these be cultivated through creative aesthetic practices?

Steve Lyons: This brings me back to the point where we started, where I wanted to make a distinction between a framework that is organized around art and a framework that is organized around cultural production. The term cultural production includes the production of food, rituals, aesthetic practices, and forms of resistance. From the vantage of cultural production, it becomes easier to see what is actually happening within the movements. Where are we beginning to see the production, or at least the prefiguration, of a more livable world? For several years, Not An Alternative has been admiring the work of Indigenous water protectors and land defenders. And one of the things that has really struck us about the struggles against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock or against the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline at Unist’ot’en Camp on Wetʼsuwetʼen territory in the northwestern part of Canada, for example, is that they are both strongly oppositional – building blockades, holding their ground, and claiming sovereignty of the place against the pipeline company – and also affirmative. Behind the barricades there are camps which operate like training grounds for non-capitalist modes of life, places where people are collectively developing new ways of living and rediscovering old ones, establishing relations to the land and each other that are incommensurate with the extractivist reasoning that has led to the climate crisis. We cannot survive without a thriving world and the world will not survive unless we respect it. And the political and ethical obligation to the land that arises from this way of seeing and relating is not only inspiring. When it’s instituted at the barricades and cultural camps, it also establishes, here and now, a relation to the land and political horizon that points toward a world beyond capitalism.

Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives.

Steve Lyons is Research Director at the Natural History Museum and a core member of Not An Alternative since 2014.

This interview was originally published in MQ Journal (October 10, 2021).