History does not only take place on the land—land has a formative role in shaping history through the way in which it is lived on and lived with, valued and devalued, fought over and defended, and sustained and exploited. This seminar will explore how and why to understand land as history, as well as land politics and land futures. What sources and methodologies are available to explore land in historical terms? How to relate histories of land to other histories, such as histories of architecture and cities? How do historicizations of land open onto anti-colonial, decolonial, and Native histories? How can grounding history in land lead to making amends to the land for the violence that has been and continues to be inflicted on it?
In this seminar, we will grapple with these and related questions by exploring the land we occupy on and around the University of Michigan campus. To do so, we will learn how to use archival material at the Bentley Historical Library, Washtenaw County Register of Deeds Office, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and other collections of historical sources. We will also explore treaties between the U.S. Government and Native people and land surveys as forms of historical evidence. As well as using archives for research, we will investigate the politics of the archive, including a review of unarchiving and other practices of archival refusal. In so doing, we will aim at understanding land not only as a territorial object, as it is almost always approached and acted on in colonial contexts, but also as a pedagogy of place-based knowledge about the world. Framing our study of land in the context of reparative justice, we will also explore the possibilities and limits of engaged research.
