The Carbon Colony: Dispossession of Indigenous Populations and Timber Resources in the US Southeast

New scholarship and technological developments have emerged in ostensibly unrelated fields: Native American responses to European colonization and mass timber construction. A salient figure in both, the Southern Pine forest emerges, not as passive backdrop but an active participant in – or victim of – the dispossession of indigenous populations and the exigencies of climate change. The same region hosts the Longleaf and Loblolly pine ecosystems, and their struggle for dominance explicates the ferocity with which colonial forces upended millennia of ecosystems development. The forest is now urgently being asked by relative novices to do what it had done for millennia – provide shelter and healing for the planet and its people. This paper describes the development of this scenario and posits that lessons from pre-colonial indigenous practices and ecosystems might be well-paired with existing demands to equitably combat climate change.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.InterMaterialEco.23.28

Volume Editors
Caryn Brause & Chris Flint Chatto