My current work, Homestead, is an account of Midwestern Whiteness and colonialism. The farmland my family owns in Southwestern Minnesota is part of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ and Yankton ancestral home. The 1851 treaty of Traverse des Sioux assigned ownership of this land to the United States Government, and the 1862 Homestead Act paved the way for my German great-great-great-great grandfather to claim land.

“Mom, what was the land before the settlers were here?”

“It was just prairie,” she says incredulously, as though stating the obvious.

Not incidentally, the Homestead Act was signed into law the same year as the US-Dakota War and forceful removal of Dakota people from Southern Minnesota. This work is centered around the history of this forceful removal of one people group in favor of another, and consideration of my ancestral involvement in colonization. It examines ways the pioneer spirit, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism are implicitly (and often explicitly) embedded into the Midwestern cultural narrative.

“I was interested in the way the colonial gaze became an American gaze that didn’t acknowledge itself as colonial; it conceived of itself as entitled.” – Alan Michelson (Aperture 240)