“White people passed laws specifically in order to take away this land from our people. And then we did these other things in order to try to survive.” ALLOTMENT STORIES is a volume that collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance, highlighting how Indigenous peoples have consistently engaged creativity to sustain collective ties, kinship relations, and cultural commitments in the face of land privatization. Two contributors to this volume, Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Joseph M. Pierce, are here today to share their pieces of this history.


Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini) is an artist, educator, and PhD candidate
in Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, nitspu tititʸu
tsʔitɨnɨ patwin, in the unceded homeland of the Patwin-speaking
people (unratified Treaty “J” region).

Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) is associate professor in the Department of
Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. He is the author of
Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890–1910
and, with S.J Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent), cocurator of the Indigenous-led
performance series Knowledge of Wounds.



ALLOTMENT STORIES: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege is a collection edited by Daniel Heath Justice and Jeani O’Brien. More info: z.umn.edu/allotmentstories.

Allotment Stories: Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Joseph M. Pierce

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

Allotment Stories: Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Joseph M. Pierce

University of Minnesota Press

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