Extraction
This photographic project began in the summer of 2013 as I traveled across present-day Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado paying homage to various sites of Indigenous genocide. Fort Sumner is a military reservation that operated from 1863 to 1868 to incarcerate mostly Apache and Diné forcibly removed from their homelands. Meanwhile, following the Pike's Reak gold rush in the late 1850s, settler violence proliferated rapidly across the Colorado front range. On November 29, 1864 a regiment of volunteer calvary attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment of mostly women and children in southeastern Colorado territory. These places of incarceration and violence are now sites of commemoration. To process the grief and anger after visiting these sites, I began to document technologies of environmental extraction as ongoing manifestations of settler violence across our landscapes. Where words fail me, the land speaks.