"Slowing" Time: Indigenous Critiques
of the Anthropocene
In The Uncompromising Hand, Andrea Carlson reflects on the social and environmental turmoil Indigenous people experienced as U.S. settlers colonized and industrialized the Upper Mississippi River valley. Carlson’s exhibit revisits the acts of colonial imagination that envisaged the absence of Spirit Island and thereby paved the way for the industrial expansion of the St. Anthony Falls region. She creates a tangible space for reconsidering the impacts of such landscape alterations, underscoring the disjunction between colonial temporalities and the river’s relatively long timeline. Her work stresses that short-term goals of colonial and industrial expansion have had immense impacts on the river and its Indigenous inhabitants. Her visual revival of Spirit Island artistically slows time to enable a reflection on colonialism as an environmentally and culturally disruptive force within the longer timescale of Indigenous existence in order to reimagine a more sustainable future.
Pointing to this sense of disruption places Carlson’s work in conversation with discussions surrounding climate change, which often indicate that the earth’s processes are speeding up due to industrialization. In response to the contemporary climate crisis, historians have shifted the temporalities used to describe the relationship of humans to the natural world. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty observes that, in the mid-twentieth century, the overarching scholarly assumption was that “man’s environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man’s relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all” (204). Now, it is more widespread in literature on global warming that “the climate, and hence the overall environment, can sometimes reach a tipping point at which this slow and apparently timeless backdrop for human actions transforms itself with a speed that can only spell disaster for human beings” (205). Chakrabarty points to the way that time seems to speed up when the perceived stability of the environment becomes unpredictable, as it has in the geologic epoch of the Anthropocene.
While scholars have argued that the Anthropocene brings with it a different temporality, Carlson’s work indicates that, rather than climate change, it is colonization that serves as a disruptive force within human temporalities. The Uncompromising Hand draws attention to the relatively short temporalities considered during projects of industrial expansion along the Upper Mississippi River. Carlson questions the cultural and environmental costs of short-term efforts toward “progress” such as the construction of the St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam:
We are seeing the ‘uncompromising hand’ of industrialization at work all over even to this day. And to what ends? The Upper St Anthony Lock and Dam was in use for a little over 50 years. That is only a blip on the timeline of the river. ("An Interview")
In referring to the lifespan of the lock and dam as a “blip,” Carlson indicates the unexpected and temporary nature of the lock and dam’s existence, highlighting the disruptive nature of the construction of the lock and dam within the long environmental and social history of the river. For Indigenous peoples of North America who think on timescales of tens of thousands of years, “the time period of European, U.S., and Canadian colonialism, imperialism, and settlement appears very short and acutely disruptive” (“Indigenous Climate” 159). Colonization, militarization, and industrialization all serve as “anthropogenic environmental changes that rapidly disrupted many Indigenous peoples” (154).
Importantly, Carlson emphasizes that this social and environmental disruption began with the imagined projection of Spirit Island’s absence. Carlson was inspired by the way that places can be mentally erased through maps and sketches before they are physically demolished:
While I was researching for this project, I noticed that so many proposals for the ‘development’ of the river started off as drawings, hand-rendered maps and ideation renderings by architectural firms. These artists had to imagine a cemented waterfall. They had to imagine in a lock and dam and imagine out some islands. To communicate this potential future they had to illustrate it. The destruction of Spirit Island started off as a drawing without it ("An Interview")
Indigenous perspectives, then, indicate the need to reconsider temporalities of colonial “development” and “progress” on the river. Instead of focusing on the current climate crisis as the root of temporal disruption, Carlson insists that we look further back to very first acts of colonialism: capitalistic projections on the landscape.
In an era that might seem to be “speeding up” due to climate change, Carlson’s exhibit “slows down” this pace of time by visually reviving a destroyed Indigenous sacred site in order to demonstrate the implications of its removal by colonial forces and its continued significance as an imagined entity in the contemporary Indigenous consciousness. Public and scholarly narratives surrounding climate change depict a rapid, irreversible succession from industrialism to human apocalypse. But Carlson disrupts this linear succession by visually bringing back Spirit Island. Projecting the removed island into the contemporary landscape creates a temporal multiplicity that enables reflection on the past and reimagination of the future. Through artistic renditions of photos of U.S. settlers quarrying the limestone island, Carlson revisits the industrial violence that dismantled the sacred site. But rather than attempting to return to an environmental past, her art reimagines the island to recreate the future of the river valley and its Indigenous inhabitants. By reconsidering the valley’s colonial past, Carlson’s exhibit rejects the idea that cultural and environmental disruptions are irreversible, stressing cultural change and resistance in the face of apocalypse.