Papermaking, Indigeneity, and Colonialism

Walker, Leila; Walker, Leila

What might book history look like if we rejected colonialist methodologies and instead centered Indigenous practices, histories, and resistances? While the study of textual culture has often operated within colonialist structures, its methodologies enable us to question simple narratives of colonial encounters. This panel draws together strands from emerging conversations on Indigenous textual materiality, botanical collecting, and the extractive colonial context of European and American literary traditions. This panel enters into community with scholarship on Indigenous media history by scholars such as Marie Battiste and Matt Cohen, and builds on expanding definitions of paper advanced by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer. In this way, it shifts the conversation around textual culture toward more inclusive scholarly definitions, histories, and practices.

Amy Gore establishes the stakes of our conversation by asking what paper might be if its definitions were not limited by legacies of cultural genocide and colonialism but instead included Indigenous and decolonial understandings of paper and papermaking. Gore approaches paper as a global and Indigenous phenomenon by expanding previous bibliographic definitions of paper to include the use of plants such as the paper mulberry and Indigenous types of paper such as birchbark, papyrus, tapa, and amatl. She addresses the histories of the paper industry (currently the fifth largest industry globally) that fail to account for the exploitation of Indigenous geographical resources—trees, water, and land—used in paper manufacturing. By revising historiographies of paper that center Anglophone definitions, production, and writing, Gore argues for a spatial justice of paper that encompasses both its structural racisms and its global, Indigenous materiality.

Miranda Burgess explores how the British demand for papermaking resources developed alongside the rise of extractive colonialism. She presents James Cook’s descriptions of Mowachaht Territory at Yuquot in his third Voyage to the Pacific (1784) as, essentially, a resource catalog encouraging the formation of a colony. Burges details the emergence of twin shipbuilding/shipchandling and wood pulp industries from these catalogs during and after the founding of Fort Victoria and its associated Pacific fleet RN station in the early-mid 1840s and the subsequent colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Most importantly, Burgess puts these extractions into conversation with Mowachaht-Muchalaht (two Nuu-chah-nulth nations) media history, focusing on the transportation and communications functions of wood, especially cedarwood, Douglas fir, and yew. Burgess argues that the networks of British paper include not only trees as raw materials, but also trees as media, and medial uses of trees for carriage, communication, information storage, diplomacy, and ceremony.

The entanglement of papermaking, extractive colonialism, and Indigenous media traditions was and is a global phenomenon, as Javiera Barrientos demonstrates in her examination of how European and colonial American shortages in papermaking materials led to a global quest for alternative materials. To confront the shortage of paper’s primary materials, scientists and papermakers reached for alternatives which they could mix with existent recycled paper, rags or gelatin to create new substrates for new publishing surfaces. Barrientos follows the materiality of an edition of the Echantillons de Papier de Substances Végétales (1786) by Pierre Alexandre Léorier-Delisle, one of the first western books printed entirely out of plant based fiber paper, into the innovative papermaking trade of late 18th-century France. She studies this edition’s revolutionary linden tree fiber paper and its varied plant paper samples in relation to the Crown's botanical extractivism and its capacity to manage the country’s natural resources. Barrientos then looks at the final section of this book, a tapa (Polynesian barkcloth), in response to European Pacific expansionist enterprises and 18th century curiosities markets. The presence of these fabrics forces us to reread Léorier-Delisle’s book under the light of a nationalism entangled with colonial practices of trade, extraction, and exoticism.

Ethnobotanist James Ojascastro concludes by turning our attention to the future of Indigenous papermaking. As he argues, the millenia-long tradition of papermaking in Southeast Asia has been inadequately and inaccurately documented, flattening a botanically and culturally diverse region into a monolith. As mass produced, machine-made wood-pulp paper industries displace artisanal paper arts, Ojascastro offers detailed documentation of the papermaking and bookbinding traditions of the Cao Lan people of Vietnam, who record genealogies in books made from haupau bark. The documentation of these traditions is an urgent first step towards their conservation and continued practice.

Together, these papers illuminate the global history and significance of papermaking within the context of colonialism and anti-colonial resistance. By centering the history—and future—of Indigenous papermaking traditions, our panelists extend our understanding of global media and written communication while advancing current notions of book history.

615 Papermaking, Indigeneity, and Colonialism: Calls for Papers