The colonial Imagination
2024. Earthenware, slip, glaze, glitter, fibers.
Our idea of the cowboy is draped in the masculine dressings of the silver screen of Hollywood and spun out of pop-culture folklore. All the while, cowboys were historically impoverished and commonly persecuted individuals from the POC and LGBTQ populations. They have sat offstage, as their culture and identities are cherry-picked and rebranded by the media.
The icon of the cowboy is a glamorized embodiment of settler coloniality and its progress in the United States. Settlers embarked through this decidedly unclaimed land, dividing and commercially cultivating these newfound properties. This cultivation led by the cowboy is realized in the form of cattle drives and open-range grazing practices. There is a coherence that is required for land and its ecosystems to continue. It requires the energy of its protection to be sustained. This assumes that a responsibility and a system of ethics are produced by the land. Settler language does not typically have space for this expanded ethics.
Dispossession is a category of capitalism and colonialism. By the inquisition of the church, if people were not Christian and properly civilized through the European lens, then they were unable to “own” land. These laws and fractures made to land and people were through a European language, sense of understanding, and control. Ultimately, these acts begin “laminating” over thousands of years of earlier human histories.
Translation has a habit of losing identities. This happens through implicit overwriting or out of the inherent carelessness of lamination. Colonialism and the white-washing of identity only leave space to “other.” It forces people to identify themselves through a scripted lens. As white settlers and their employed cowboys quickly expanded across North America, the renaming of places covered over Indigenous presence, beginning the “breaking apart of being-from-the-land and knowing-from-the-land.” (Burkhart)