 Hello, everybody, welcome. My name is Lucia Alice. I'm an associate professor of architecture and the director of the Buell Center here at Columbia. Welcome to Land, Law, Labor, the seventh and last of our conversations on architecture and land in and out of the Americas. The series began a year ago, almost exactly, in order to tell non-objectifying histories of land and to heed the call and the insight on the part of indigenous scholars and activists and their allies that land is not an object, but land is a relationship. And the plural Americas in our title is also meant to provincialize the phrase that gives the Buell Center its mission, the study of American architecture, by reminding us, first of all, that the United States exists in a kind of hemispheric relation with other nations on the continent, and secondly, that there are always several Americas within the United States. So the series began almost a year ago, and I want to take a moment to remind you that video for them is available on the Buell's website. In our first event, as I said almost 12 months ago, the scholar and artist Teresa Montoya presented her research on the checkerboard allotments and other legal and geometric instruments that transformed DNA homelands into a settlable and sellable commodity land. And Montoya was in conversation with the architect Joseph Kunkel, who works to devise a kind of set of counter instruments from grant writing to designing and mapping that are necessary to build new housing on indigenous reservation lands. So today, for our last event, we kind of return to this moment, in a sense, from the late 18th to the 19th and ongoing way of the century, when homelands became settlable land in North America. And we ask what we can learn about the specific relationship between land and law, and also labor is a kind of underlying procedure. The specific relation that was created historically through settlement, through improvement, through surveying, all those spatial practices that relied on very specific physical and discursive tools. And I just want to make the comment that this is no small task to try to write the history of law. Mark Oseo, the legal scholar, has famously written that there's a kind of contradiction, a kind of friction between law and history as two discourses, where law aims at concision and generality and inclusion. He writes, history aims at differentiation and specificity. And Oseo writes this in the context of debates within the international legal community today, government institutions, about how present day institutions can learn from history, and especially, in his case, the history of genocide, in their efforts to work for a more just future. But as our two guests today will show, if we want to work for justice, then, in a way, an even more radical shift is going to be necessary that revisits not only the relationship between land, law, and history, but that asks what qualifies as a legal act? What qualifies as historical event or foundational speech? So our guests today are Mabel Wilson and Brenna Bendar. Let me just give you a bit of a formal introduction for each. Mabel Wilson is the Nancy and George era professor of architecture, planning, and preservation, and a professor in African-American and African diaspora studies at Columbia University, where she also serves as the director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, IRS. She was a member. She's a designer. She was a member of the design team that helped design the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA. She's authored a number of books and edited them. Negro Building in 2012, Race and Modern Architecture was recently. And she was also a co-curator of the MoMA exhibition Reconstructions, Architecture and Blackness in America. Mabel will go first. And she'll be followed by Brenna Bendar, who is an associate professor at the Peter A. L. Ard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. Prior to that, she'd been a reader in law and critical theory at SOAS. She's held a number of other visiting appointments across the globe. She's written widely and generously. Most recently, she edited with Rafif Ziyada, the Compendium Revolutionary Feminisms. And her book, Colonial Lives of Property, which was published in 2018 by Duke University Press, has been on the desk of every critical thinker I know ever since. So we're thrilled that both Brenna and Mabel have agreed to share new work with us and with each other. And as you'll see, law is at the core of Banda's work. Labor is perhaps the more central actor in Wilson's work. And the stories they tell are 100 years apart. But as you will hear, they're echoes and overlaps. And I just wanted to say also, as a comfortist myself, I'm in particular awe of the way both Wilson and Banda are dealt deeply and rigorously into archives in order to situate their studies into the particular lives of historical actors. But as you'll see, both are also always unflinching in drawing and encouraging us to draw broad and comparative insights and sort of building solidarity across fields in a class discipline. So Mabel will go first, then we will go straight to Brenna, and then we'll have kind of debate and discussion between them. And if you have questions, if the audience has questions, you're encouraged to put them in the Q&A. And if we have time, we will get to them. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Mabel Wilson. Wonderful. It's a real honor to be asked to be a part of what has really been a remarkable series. I would encourage people to go back and look at the recordings of the previous conversations around this topic. So I just want to thank Lucia, also Jordan, and Jacob for the invitation and putting this together. And I also feel just honored to be in conversation with Brenna, whose book actually really was helpful in working through the second chapter of a book I was working on. And I was so inspired by her book. I kind of built a PhD colloquium around it a few years ago, specifically just title property. And so I'm delighted to be sharing the afternoon with Brenna. OK, I'm going to start. This is really a condensation of one section of a chapter, which is part of a larger project. So I'm just going to give it a little context. And so for several years, I've been working on a monograph, Building, Race, and Nation, Slavery, Dispossession, and US Civic Architecture from 1780 to 1860. And this book is a book link to architectural and cultural history that explores the emerging modern discourses of architecture, nationalism, and racial difference as they influence the creation of civic buildings in the first 75 years of the United States. And so as it works through the archival material and the book's five chapters, the question of property as a central formation of modernity and also of the modern subject, and in particular, racialization, the human and citizenship, has become an important theoretical thread. And so in her invaluable groundbreaking, The Colonial Lives of Property, let me advance the next slide, Brett writes that her book tends to quote, trace three different economic, political, philosophical, and cultural rationales for specific legal modalities of ownership that appear at particular historical junctures in settler colonies. The ideology of use that casts both land and its native inhabitants as a need of improvement. The logical abstraction that underlie increasingly commodified vision of land and human life from the 17th century onward and the use of the juridical concept of status to bind together identity and property relations. So central to Brett's argument in The Colonial Lives of Property is what she describes as the analogous relationship between race and property that is produced by quote, and through complex interrelations between capital, science, and culture, end quote. And so the consideration of property has fostered in my project about architecture, about civic architecture, a correlation between whiteness, blackness, and indigeneity. So in other words, how American whiteness was formed and fortified not only in relationship to blackness, which was my regional conjecture in the project. So blackness and its captivity. But as I started to work archivaly, I realized it was also through indigeneity and its dispossession. So just a little preview of just the first chapter. So the first chapter of Building Race and Nation examined statesmen, naturalist, architect, planter, and slave owner, Thomas Jefferson's design for the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond to reveal the mutually constitutive relationship between race, reason, and architecture. And so for Jefferson's architectures, virtues of durability, utility, and beauty was a means of improving the tastes, as he writes in a few letters, of white Americans and hence elevating their moral character. Now, Jefferson wrote and revised his only book, Notes on a State of Virginia, which was published in 1784, during the same years that he designed the State Capitol, which was erected in part by enslaved labor on land formally inhabited by the Poetown Confederacy. Now for Jefferson, as for many naturalists of this period, observation was essential to discern the characteristics or properties of things in the world, including, as he writes in Notes on a State of Virginia, geographies, animal, plants, minerals, and people. Through his meditation on the state of the State of Virginia, and in particular, its three races, Jefferson sought to speculate on how outer what we call phenotypical in racial science, 19th century racial science, attributes of skin color were determinant of inner moral character and also aptitude, especially the capacity for reason, which in his mind was necessary to comprehend what it means to be free and to make claims on citizenship and also on being human. So my second chapter, which will be the focus of this talk, looks at the planning and building of Washington DC. The establishment of the new federal capital erected on the fall line of the Potomac River was intended by its founders, which included Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, and a host of white male politicians, landowners and investors, to actually be a major trading port between the Chesapeake and the Northwest Territory, still inhabited by a Confederacy of indigenous nations. Now during his appointment as the Plenipotentiary to France, Jefferson wrote from Paris in 1785 to James Monroe, the Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress about the prospect of states annexing additional territories from indigenous nations, a possibility with the recent passage of the land ordinance of 1785. Now in this letter, Jefferson anticipated that, quote, it is evident that when a sufficient number of Western states come in, they will remove Congress to Georgetown, end quote. So the Potomac River represented an ideal location for a federal city, particularly those areas above what is called the fall line, which occurred at little falls where the sandy loam of the tidewater, the flat area reaching the Atlantic, met the rocky upsurge of the Piedmont Mountains. The Potomac was home to several important port towns, Georgetown being one, but also Alexandria, which were emerging as busy ports for tobacco and reed, which required milling and storage before being shipped to other parts of the US, the Caribbean and also Europe. So the 10 mile by 10 mile rotated square for the capital city, straddling the snaking bends of the Potomac and the boundaries of the states of Virginia and Maryland, then says how the tools and technique of surveying layered abstract platonic geometries onto the land. Now scientifically minded surveyors like Andrew Ellicott, who drew this, who established the outer boundaries of Washington city in the District of Columbia, were capable of measuring large territories and were widely admired and in demand in expanding the national footprint of the United States. Now in this endeavor to basically lay the outer lines of the capital was Benjamin Banneker, who was a free self-educated black mathematician and astronomer and Banneker joined in part, it is believed as a protest by Quakers like Ellicott who vehemently objected to Jefferson's insistence in notes on the inferior mental capacity of the Negro race. Now Jefferson in response to query 14 in notes, notes that blackness was a quote, sublime eternal monotony and quote, immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race end quote of the Negro race. So in Jefferson's mom, while all men were born equal as national rights proponent advocated to Jefferson, the Negro possessed neither the aptitude for reason nor the faculties to appreciate beauty but especially liberty. Now as the sons of wealthy Virginia planters both Washington and Jefferson were skilled in the art of surveying. Prior to his military service, George Washington had completed over a hundred surveyors in Virginia many along the Potomac in territories of the indigenous Susquehonics. Expertise in surveying was an essential part for saying the vast tracks of land owned by Washington which included his plantation Mount Vernon a conglomeration of five farms totaling 8,000 acres. Now, Mount Vernon was home to Washington's family for over and over 300 enslaved people. Washington had been purchasing and selling land speculatively since he acquired his first track in 1752. By the time he was president and given the power to select the side of the new federal city, Washington had amassed thousands of acres a fair amount of it in the Northwest Territ in Western regions, including the Northwest Territory. Now, Washington had been an early advocate in 1754 of clearing the Potomac River and building a canal around the falls. Making the waterway navigable would increase the values of his holdings in the Potomac Valley and also in the Ohio Valley about 20,000 acres that he had been awarded as an officer fighting in the Virginia regiment in the Seven Years War prior to the Revolutionary War. Now, Jefferson also had a proficiency as a surveyor and served for a brief period as a surveyor for Albemar County, Virginia in 1773 before choosing a more lucrative career in law and then later on to politics and so on. But it should be noted that Jefferson's father Peter Jefferson working with survey of Joshua Fry created one of the most important maps of the 18th century Virginia for Lord Fairfax, who held valuable but disputed lands of the Northern Neck which included the Shenandoah Valley and tracks along the Southern Potomac branch. And so this is that map seen here. This is a pre-revolutionary map. So essential for the Colonial Project was the transformation of land into property, the appropriation of land as a legal and political process to establish ownership was foundational to the formation of the state as a modern nation and the self as a modern subject. The technology and science of surveying whose methods were updated and made available through various books, outlining methods, facilitated how settlers and states in the Americas abstracted land into plots locatable on maps. The survey recorded an area's most relevant and valuable attributes. And once a deed was rendering the land fungible, it could be exchanged and sold. And you could see here on that savage painting, right? That Martha Jefferson and her granddaughter are holding a map of Washington DC. And then on the right is an indigenous, not an enslaved, he's enslaved valid, Henry on the right. And then you see the grandson literally holding calipers and the globe on the left. And so once land is abstracted into property excised from the earth, it can be possessed and enclosed. And so what drove the accumulation of land by European powers and private individuals was its productive potential from small farms to plantation to mining and other forms of extraction as this cartige shows on the Fried Jefferson map, that Virginia was a major point where these sort of large barrels of tobacco were shipped out. So in 1784, the Confederation Congress formed a committee which included Virginia representative Thomas Jefferson to determine how to manage its Western boundaries, lands and lands west of the Appalachian Mountains where many different indigenous nations lived including ones displaced from the East by war and disease since the arrival of Europeans. Now this task proved a difficult one because 13 states had not yet unified into a nation and still functioned as sovereign states. Now prior to leaving for Paris, Jefferson authored the land ordinance of 1784 that determined the protocols for how territories taken or purchased from indigenous nations should become sovereign states and join the Confederation. In its details, the ordinance outlined geographical coordination for the creation of distinct states settled by a specific population of 20,000 free white males who agreed to adopt Republican forms of governance. Building upon the previous degree, the land ordinance that followed a year later of 1785, congressional colleagues following Jefferson's cartographic details of the previous act conceived of a system for parceling the territory into lots, which developed a grid of six mile townships with those subdivided into smaller 36 one mile tracks of land. Now in one of its last acts, the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to officially establish the Northwest Territory bounded by the Ohio River on the Southern Edge and the Mississippi River on the Western Edge, which would eventually as per the protocol stipulated in the ordinance become the states of Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin. Now once the Constitution established the United States, the US Congress two years later adopted this ordinance in one of its first act. And in adopting the ordinance enacted two controversial clauses and this is what I'll talk about for the rest of my talk. One, it concretized a process preceding lands of indigenous nation to the federal government for white settlement. And two, it strategically prevented indentured servitude and slaveholding from gaining foothold in the Northwest Territory as it became states. Now by 1789, the Northwest Ordinance laid out a plan for the Westward expansion of the United States into the sovereign lands of several indigenous tribes. The final section ensured that for settlers within any new state, there would be religious freedoms, roots of habeas corpus, benefits, fair taxation and free passage on roadways and waterways. It also guaranteed that the utmost faith quote, let me just show these, this is the Ohio purchase using that similar grid. And so the ordinance of 1789 describes that the utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians. Their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent and in their property rights and liberty they shall never be invaded or disturbed unless in just an unlawful wars or authorized by Congress. But laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made for presenting wrongs being done to them and for preserving peace and friendship with them. Now, ideally good faith establishes a plane of ethical behavior and intent between two co-equal parties entering into a contract. However, the practice of good faith to respect the property rights of Native Americans and their right to liberty frames the entire agreement from the perspective of Western laws and rights. In a no way includes language or literally languages describing how indigenous nations viewed their own relationship to land or how they may want to determine its status. To be sure, good faith makes the United States government the arbiter of any violation by Native Americans of the nation's laws that might instigate quote, just an lawful wars authorized by Congress. Historian Jeffrey Osler asserts that state sanctioned violence of warfare described in the ordinance was quote, a concrete option to deal with the formidable indigenous movement organized to resist efforts to obtain Indian lands. End quote. To that end, scholar Denise De Silva makes clear that in this early history, the post colony colonizer US quote, Indian tribes appear as foreign politics with which the newborn state could engage in the way sovereign collectivities relate to others. Namely trade, treaties, and more. But not long after the institution of the US state, however, it was evident that two or more sovereign political bodies could not occupy the same territory at least when the economic configuration of one increasingly required more and more of the other's land, natural resources and natural resources, end quote. Now, with the threat of a unifying government of Americans for 13 states and their territories, one eager to add additional land for settlement indigenous nations form their own Confederacy. The United Indian Nations, UIN, sometimes called the Northwest Confederacy was created in 1783, the same year the Revolutionary War ended. And it was created to engage the US's military and government representatives seeking the peaceful cessation of the land. The alliance of indigenous tribes brought together of G-ways, Ottawa's, and Poetami's along the Western Great Lakes, the Iroquois, Hedonawasi, Mohawks, and Wyandots, the Miami's, the Wea's, and the Pianica's Shahs along the Wabash River, the Chigamagua Cherokees who had been forced out of the Western Appalachian Mountains and the Delaware Lenape who had migrated into the region from the Atlantic coast after the displacement by European settlers. The populations of many tribes have been drastically reduced and weakened by decades of war and the spread of disease. This devastation prompted the remaining members of tribal groups to migrate westward, fleeing the presence and conflicts with not only what becomes the US, but also with the French, the British, and Spanish colonists. Members of the UIN entered into treaties with the new US government in good faith and insisted on maintaining the clear boundaries of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to demarcate their territory from the United States. Beginning in 1789, however, President Washington, his secretary of war, Henry Knox, and territorial officials authorized military campaigns against indigenous villages to force them to cede land. This pressure tactic enlisted military expeditions that continued the policy of deadly extirpation like the earlier Scorch Earth actions that occurred during the Revolutionary Wars, Sullivan and Clinton campaigns in New York State. So the US government sanctioned the wholesale, this is when the US government sanctioned the wholesale destruction of villages and their agricultural land in order to wipe away their presence in territories that were to be surveyed and sold to white settlers migrating from the East. Now, as the Confederation transitioned into the United States with the passage of the Constitution, the question of whether slavery would spread with the expansion of the nation's border was also another contentious issues. The authors of the Northwest Territory incorporated a passage in its last article to address the question, quote, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in said territory, otherwise than an impudishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, provided always that any person escaping into the same from who labor or surface is lawfully claimed in one of the original stage, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid. Now, as scholars have noted, the article was ambiguous at best. Northern and upper South abolitionists grasped the implications that there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in said territory as a solvo against the spread of slavery into the Northwest Territory and to its future states. But from their perspective, the Ohio River would be the dividing line between where slavery was prohibited, Northward and Westward, and where it was legal in the South. Now, Southern slave holders, however, read the latter half of the article as a affirmation that the enslaved would not be granted freedom if they ventured into the territory and that legal rights to their human property prevail, their claims to the property. So some Southerner plantation owners even saw the limits on slavery in the Northwest Territory as positively reinforcing the institution of slavery in yet to be formally claimed Southwest Territory. And writing to James Monroe, William Grayson, a member of the committee suggested that the prohibition was, quote, agreed to by Southern members for the purpose of preventing tobacco and indigo trade from being made, unquote, in the Northwest Territory. Now, the passage of the ordinances to legalize the claim over the Western lands indicates the importance of the Northwest Territory to the future of the nation, particularly in its effort to grow its citizenry by yuring white Euro-Americans with the prospect of land ownership, land that also required labor for it to be cleared and turned into fertile agricultural holdings. So the future location of the national capital, the federal city, would hinge upon its proximity, not only to the Northern and Southern states, but also to future states in the West. Siding the new capital along the Potomac, a river reaching into the gateways of the Northwest Territory made it an ideal choice for the new federal city. Now, to tame the Potomac by creating a series of canals and locks to navigate the major rapids that terraced the 275 mile long river, the states of Maryland and Virginia chartered the Potomac Company in 1784 and 1785, respectively. It was the first intrastatal effort at infrastructure construction. The Potomac Company raised capital by selling stock to investors, including those overseas. Now, to lead the new Potomac Company, the directors in the late 1784 elected George Washington, who was given shares in the company by the Virginia legislature. And while the expertise of engineers and surveyors were a critical part of the development of the canal system, the company also needed physical labor to remove rocks and trees along the Potomac, as well as to dig and lay the miles of foundation walls for the canal. And initially, the Potomac Company sought white free labor for these tasks. However, there was a shortage of available workers and so efforts to lure white indentured servers from your indentured servants, from your rather, failed to yield a large work crew. So the owners of the Potomac Company had to solicit the rental of enslaved men, which probably included women and children for supporting labor from nearby plantations to complete the work. So this became a kind of labor framework to build a Potomac Company. So this will just be a concluding point. So going forward a little bit, on March 28th, 1791, the survey Andrew Ellicott presented the first survey of the federal city to now president George Washington in Georgetown. Two weeks later, three white commissioners appointed by Washington who would oversee the construction of Washington DC, Thomas Johnson, David Stewart and Daniel Carroll, who were all stockholders in the Potomac Company and slave owners joined the entourage of politicians and important white citizens to place a cornerstone, this cornerstone at Jones Point to mark the southernmost extension of the new federal city, eight miles north of Washington's plantation of Mount Vernon. And so I will end here. Thank you, Mabel. That stone is quite the physical artifact to end a story that is made up entirely of instruments that make, but the barris of traces on a piece of paper, reorganizing all of this labor, amazing story. Okay, thank you, Mabel. We'll go straight to Brenna. If you're ready, Brenna, take it away. Great, thank you so much. So to begin with, thank you, Lucia, for that incredibly warm and generous introduction. And it is such a pleasure and also an honor to be in conversation with Mabel who's given us so much to think about. I want to begin also by just acknowledging that I'm speaking from the unseated and ancestral territories of the Slale-Waututh and the Squamish First Nations. And to say that the land is unseated is to acknowledge that their lands were not given up in through treaty and that the lands were not sold and nor were the Slale-Waututh or Squamish First Nations conquered in warfare. And so it's really in making the land acknowledgement apropos of what I'm going to speak about today is to really point out the lack of foundation or the illegitimacy of the current property regime that exists on these lands. So if you'll forgive me for not for speaking on the webinar without images, I'll just launch into my talk which is about the racial politics of preemption. In 1860, Governor James Douglas, the first governor of the newly amalgamated colony of British Columbia, issued a proclamation declaring that all unsurveyed land would be open for preemption. Preemption enabled the British subjects and aliens and I'm quoting now from the proclamation who took the oath of allegiance to her majesty and her successors to acquire unoccupied and unreserved and unsurveyed land, end quote. The preemption would then set the basis for the acquisition of title to that land by settlers who fulfilled certain conditions which I will flesh out in a minute. And the doctrine of preemption really becomes the primary means of establishing a settler economy of private property on unceded indigenous territories inaugurating what I have termed a racial regime of ownership that has retained its hegemonic legal and political form into the present. Indigenous assertions of sovereignty, movements for land back and the struggle to protect water's lands and life ways that rely on them from destructive forms of extractivism in the present are continually confronted by a logic of private property ownership, which from the outset of colonial settlement required a close even intimate relationship between the state and individual settlers. The relationship between the state and individual settlers wherein each party depended on the other to solidify colonial control over indigenous land reflects a complex theoretical modality of settler governance that remains somewhat obscured by the separation of power and ownership into putatively public and private spheres. While colonial land appropriation is often understood as taking place through the actions of settlers who are acting on and following the proclamation set out in colonial legislation taking a closer look into the history of preemption reveals a different structure of dispossession. Rather, we see a state that depended upon the illegal violence of settlers to solidify colonial sovereignty over vast territories populated by indigenous societies who had exercised jurisdiction over their lands for millennia prior to the formalization of colonial settlement in the mid 19th century. There is not only a symbiotic relationship between the assertion of colonial sovereignty over the entire province and the individual private property rights that are parasitic upon it. Arguably, the former could not have taken root were it not for settlers who violated the terms of preemption often in full view of colonial authorities in order to then affect legal preemptions of indigenous land. This was not merely a matter of convenience for the colonial state. While land legislation from the mid 19th century to the early 20th century was at times explicitly racial, heteronormative and patriarchal, the explicit nature of the legislation occludes the implicit and unspoken range of affect, belief, assumptions, the fidelity, trust, fraternity that were presumed to bind particular settlers to the colonial state, which constituted the substance or the internal workings that justified the illegal violence central to the theft of other people's lands. References in the laws of preemption to the bona fide settler who aims to expropriate the land in good faith is not merely some kind of formal phrase that lacks substantive meaning. As I want to trace throughout this paper, the racial regime of ownership that emerged in the context of preemption depended on forms of affinity between colonial officials and desirable settlers, a kinship that persists and continues to inform widely divergent state reactions to the assertion of control over public space and crown lands by different groups of people. So just to say that this historical work is really prompted by the vast differential in state responses to different forms of protest. And I have in mind, for example, thinking about the police response to and the state response to the so-called freedom convoy that took place here over the last couple of years versus the state response to land protectors and water defenders such as the Whitsoatan in Northern British Columbia. Okay, but back to the doctrine of preemption. So what is preemption? In the common law of the UK from which much of Canada's laws of property are derived, the right of preemption is a contractual and personal right solely within the purchaser's control to compel a transfer of the vendor's land at some future date. So the right of preemption is essentially a right of first refusal. It operates in such a way as to give the preemptor the right of first refusal over land that is to be sold or alienated and implies therefore some kind of preexisting relationship between the owner granting the right of preemption and the party who gains that entitlement. Significantly, whilst attracting much criticism over the years the right of preemption in the UK was not recognized as a proprietary right or as proprietary in nature until the Land Registration Act of 2002. So quite recently. In the colonies however, excuse me, the legal nature of the right of preemption was somewhat more ambiguous and something more akin to the doctrine of adverse possession or squatting. Preemption itself required the staking out of boundaries of a plot of land initially no more than 160 acres per individual which were measured out using the chains that we saw in one of Mabel's images. The preemptor would then record the preemption by drawing to the best of his ability a rough sketch of the parcel along with a written description of the land in its location and using the correct form would register it with a local magistrate. Remember that all of the land that was opened up for preemption was unsurveyed. In order to hold onto one's preemption the land had to be occupied consistently and in order to rise to the next step in acquiring outright ownership, one, the preemptor had two years to improve the land through cultivation and possibly the establishment of buildings, homestead, et cetera. After that period had elapsed the preemptor could then apply for a certificate of improvement. And once that was attained could then register a fee simple title to the plot. The process of preemption in the colonial setting of British Columbia set the scene for a series of performative acts that were essential to creating or fabricating private property on unsurveyed indigenous lands, delineating boundaries, occupying the land exclusively, using the land in a way that was cognizable within a racial capitalist economy of value and acting as if one were the proprietor even if one did not yet have fee simple title to that land. The land would only become surveyed at the point where the preemptor wanted to get fee simple title. So from the colonial administration's point of view this was a very inexpensive way of settling this territory because the state wasn't paying the cost of the survey. The colonial government in London had refused to finance this and it was a way of allowing settlers to defer the cost of serving until they were about to get a fee simple title. James Douglas essentially borrowed or imported the doctrine of preemption from the United States where as Robert Nichols writes the principle of preemption and I hear I'm quoting was recognized by the Continental Congress after the US gained independence and reformulated to apply to settlers on the Western frontier end quote. In the United States, preemption was widely used as a means of retroactively legalizing the actions of squatters. This is part of what Nichols analyzes as the recursive nature of how property is constituted. Inverting Proudhon's famous phrase Nichols has argued that acts of dispossession are what recursively constitute relations that then come to be recognized as property interests crucially in the same moment that property rights of indigenous peoples are extinguished. Preemption operates in precisely this way in the American context, giving squatters the right of first refusal over land they had occupied illegally. Now, the right of preemption gave white settlers in British Columbia, the right of first refusal over land to which they had no legitimate claim. The right of preemption assumes a relationship between the person asserting the right and the owner of the land. Now, while some early colonial governors such as James Douglas may have seen through the locking and fantasy of uncultivated wasteland, recognizing what was then referred to as quote unquote Indian title, preemption operated in a recursive manner following Nichols to constitute colonial sovereignty through positioning the state as the original owner who had assumed the right to grant preemption to settlers, preemption to paraphrase the words of the majority judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada and the Delgamook judgment which is the first judgment to recognize Aboriginal title, retroactively put the legitimacy of colonial crown sovereignty beyond any doubt. Fusing together the sovereign power of the colonial authorities with the property logic of private ownership, preemption was a doctrine that enabled the settlers to undertake the work of settlement both for individual gain and the formation of the state. It is clear that the power of the colonial sovereign to control land and make territory has always relied upon the force of the individual petty sovereign who with the backing and blessing of the state makes land waste in order to appropriate it. As explored above the doctrine of preemption as a means of creating markets in land has no common law precedent. As Robert Nichols writes, quoting again, preemption, the technique by which so much unceded indigenous land was appropriated has its origins in the colonial period where a right claimed by one European power against others to first occupancy assigned a special status to the original discoverer in quotations of a new territory, end quote. So the origins of preemption itself lie in international legal doctrine that governed colonial land acquisition between European powers, as well as a feudal logic of property that gave the sovereign a power of radical or underlying ownership to all of this indigenous territory. In the international sphere, once occupying and with an intent to possess, a European state could then preempt a territory asserting their sovereignty vis-a-vis other nation states. Once it had asserted this right of preemption the sovereign of that state could give out proprietary grants based on the feudal logic that the sovereign was the ultimate owner of all the land in their claimed territory. And I guess I'll just make the point quickly but the way in which preemption originates in this international law in the doctrines of discovery and conquest really speak to the way in which the internalization or domestication of those kinds of international law are a means of continuing a form of warfare on indigenous first nations through colonial settlement. Okay, while the laws pertaining to preemption specify that Indian settlements or villages were not to be preempted in recognition of Indian title there is ample evidence that shows how Indian settlements and villages were subjected to settler violence in their drive to preempt land. The historical record is replete with testimony from first nations elders that evidence tell settlers would often make settled indigenous lands into waste thereby rendering it available for preemption. The McKenna McBride Royal Commission which was established in 1912 to resolve the quote unquote Indian question in British Columbia reveals routine violence by settlers who are treated with impunity by colonial officials. Indigenous leaders from all over the province attest to how their houses, villages and settlements were destroyed their access to fishing wood and other resources prohibited by settlers. Specifically testimony about the burning of indigenous people's homes the clearing and appropriation of reserve lands and cultivated lands that did not fall within reserve boundaries. The appropriation of land for the construction of infrastructure including roads and railways, et cetera, et cetera all point to forms of violence that were used to make lands that were very clearly occupied and used and possessed and cultivated by indigenous peoples into waste therefore rendering them open for appropriation. And what this makes clear is that even on the terms of preemption, the settlement of the province required extra legal violence. The fact that these acts were most often met with impunity reflects state support for these petty sovereigns who created markets and land based on a kind of metaphysical and racial kinship with colonial sovereign power. The state may have the monopoly of violence but the police force are not its only agents of enforcement. In fact, we can consider how the colonial state depends on the instrumentalization of this blurred monopoly by the petty sovereign or the settler population. While the assertion of a relation between colonial sovereign authority and desirable settlers was quite explicit from the mid 19th century onwards there remains an unspoken affinity between contemporary state power and the individual settler or now corporate entity who claims and receives the license to appropriate occupying own indigenous land. Sometimes affecting or sometimes through both indirect and direct forms of violence and this has taken on a multi-generational character. The inheritance of property and power can be thought without attending to its constitutive tie with kinship and this is the concluding section of the paper. Locke's attempt to secularize the divine foundations of rights to property in response to Filmer's aptly titled Patriarcha requires him to mount a full-scale attack or parody depending on how you read it on the notion that the right to property the right to property ownership derives from Adam's original inheritance of patriarchal authority and dominion over the world from God. Locke mercilessly rebuts the idea that patriarchal authority and ownership derives from an ancient and prime right of the lineal succession re-established after the great flood through the restoration of Israeli kings. The question for my inquiry though is the extent to which Locke succeeds in stripping the triangulation of sovereign power, legitimate authority and ownership of its patriarchal and theological origins and furthermore how this theological structure to racialize property relations is bound up with notions of kinship. For Locke, the commons is originally inhabited by men who are the workmanship of one omnipotent and it is through the imagined space of the state of nature that legitimate ownership begins to take on racial contours. Whilst Locke strips the notion of patriarchal power that defines sovereignty for filmer, it is evident that for Locke there remains a theological structure to his theorization of sovereign political authority and ownership. There is a contradiction between the idea that legitimate political authority must be based on consent and the political dimensions of inheritance whereby a father can set conditions on the inheritance of property by his heirs. And Locke provides the notion of tacit consent or he invents the notion of tacit consent to explain how the heir who comes to own property that is subject to state regulation accepts political authority even where he has not explicitly given his consent. And so inheritance provides a site where ownership via inheritance and political power are intermingled in Locke's theorization of ownership and governance. Thinking about this intermingling in conjunction with the racial concept of the human that runs throughout Locke's work suggests in however embryonic a form a notion of racial heteropatriarchal kinship, a framework that exposes the ways in which the imperatives of sovereign state power are conjoined to private relations of ownership. Critical literature on kinship has emerged over the past decades to fundamentally call and to question the idea that kinship requires a biological tie between those considered to be kin and has challenged the notions of blood and bloodline essential to concepts of kinship. The centrality of the notion of bloodline has always been bound up with a regulation of private property. As Judith Butler notes drawing on the work of Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon and I quote, blood that ostensibly holds people together is a highly condensed and invested metaphor for social regulations governing inheritance and property relations. End quote. Horton Spillers, Jennifer Morgan, Sidiya Hartman and many others have in very different ways illuminated how racial heteropatriarchal concepts of kinship were deployed during the era of transatlantic slave free to rendered children born to an enslaved mother and slave holder the property of the latter whilst paradoxically and simultaneously annihilating the patrilineal relation. Spillers writes of this as a hideous paradox, whereby, and I quote, one has been made and bought by disparate currencies. Linking back to a common origin of exchange and domination, the denied genetic link becomes the chief strategy of an undenied ownership as if the interrogation into the father's identity, the blank space where his proper name would fit were answered by the fact did jury of a material possession. End quote. And I'm just on the last page of texts. Spillers critique of the symbolic paradigms that conform the human body as a metonymic figure for an entire repertoire of human and social arrangements is in part achieved through her very close attention to the juridical and what she terms the doubleness of the law. It's bare faced to faceness to quote from Spillers again. Part of this doubleness for Spillers lies in the radical instability of colonial laws which were perpetually in the service of racial, social, and political economies of difference and exploitation. Shifting and responding to crises of its own making. If the perversion and destruction of kinship were historically integral to creating racial gendered value in the context of slavery, it was also central to the dispossession of indigenous land. Land theft required the attempted destruction of indigenous kinship communities and governance structures. In another hideous paradox, children born to indigenous women who had lost Indian status because they married non-status, often non-indigenous white men would also be disenfranchised, losing the right to reside on reserve land, weakening or even severing in some cases, ties to community. These critical engagements with the concept of kinship and its place in the crucible of modernity enable us to see how racial, heteropatriarchal forms of kinship were central to dispossession. Theft and dispossession of lives and land became congealed in dominant concepts of kinship based on the fiction of bloodline. What happens when we flip the way, excuse me, in which property and inheritance figure in the operations of racial kinship to ask what forms of kinship do racial regimes of private ownership demand and require? And concluding paragraph, in British Columbia, the first proclamation of 1860 stipulated that only British subjects and aliens who take the oath of allegiance to her majesty and her successors may preempt land. In a proclamation that quickly followed in 1861, the preamble states that it would be, quote, inexpedient that any person other than a bona fide settler should take up land under the said proclamation. We can see in the language of allegiance, good faith and the act of taking an oath, the settler who would in the 1860s in successive pieces of legislation explicitly exclude indigenous people from preempting land as well as Chinese immigrants. So we can see how the settler is bound to the colonial sovereign and the settler is made through entering the category of the bona fide preemptor into a racial subject. The settler preemptor by taking an oath of allegiance to the colonial version of the truth is thereby bound to the civilizational thinking that underlies colonization itself. The scene of affiliation between the colonial settler state and the individual settler as racial subject is set. They each rely on the other for their status as proprietor, sitting atop a racial hierarchy that reduced indigenous people and racialized Arivans to borrow from Jody Bird to a subordinate place in the colonial order. Thanks. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Rana. And thank you, Mabel as well. I'm hearing the papers that I have already read and already sort of hearing more resonances than I had already planned on discussing. So I'll just maybe give a bit of a commentary and encourage the audience to put your questions in the chat. Let me see, I'm trying to see if Mabel's here. Okay, I see Mabel, I see Rana. Here we are. I mean, the first thing is to say that both papers just traced in great archival detail, and again, this is just my personal pleasure, the history of the transformation of land into property. And you both are very explicit that this is a process of abstraction. There's no denying it. But you also show that these were dependent on very specific material artifacts that established legality or the effect of legal authority, let's say. You have written texts, ordinances and laws. They have a specific date. They have other supporting sort of paper objects that support them. You have surveys, which are, of course, half drawn, half written objects. Rana, you also had the rough sketch of a parcel. So there are titles which are also sort of written objects whose materiality presumably matters immensely, but what really matters is the land to which they gesture and the inability of other claims to dwelling or to a land to have a piece of paper corresponding to them. And then I'm also fascinated in the way that there are spoken oaths that make it into written media. So like a different kind of speech, what Austin would call performative speech, like an oath or an act of faith that suddenly make it onto the page being materialized in that way. And then gradually in both of your stories, we arrive also at physical things, things like dams and rivers and canals and cornerstones. And Brenna, in your case, I was very interested to see that the villages appear halfway through your paper as a kind of threshold between cases in which violence of demolition is required. Like if I understood correctly, if there was a village, if there was a literal physical object that had been erected, then that was a case for having to demolish and sometimes communities pre-demolishing this in order to avoid the fine of being destroyed. I mean, this is an incredible moment. In other words, that the building, insofar as we from today's perspective would call them buildings, are kind of used as evidence of something either being improved or not improved yet or something like that. So my first comments is simply to say that in the paper on law, in Brenna's work on law, the buildings and physical environments appears pivotal evidentiary objects. And in the paper on objects and labor, Mabel's paper, and in a book which is about honorific architecture, presumably Mabel's book is going to also talk about buildings which have dark columns and refined brick masonry work. In that paper, law appears as something that happens very different, makes labor occurred very differently on one side of a line, roughly in Ohio. From the other side of a line. And this is important to me to say because there's a tendency in the fields of the built environment, but in the humanities more generally to when we're doing interdisciplinary work with law, to defer to law, essentially to assume that law has a kind of meta abstraction. And in the case of architectural scholarship, it's often about building codes or something like that. And so I find that the power of the political critique that both of you build into your work comes in part not only from saying that what we're critiquing via our own, via concepts of property or discourse on property or historical events about settlement or about building, what we're critiquing is really law, but that law is not what we think it is. Law is not only this kind of overarching abstraction. So to return to my point, it seems to me that you show through all these objects tacit acknowledgement of a preexisting condition. Although we know the myth of settlement as one that doesn't take into account the preexisting condition in this case that concerns us, the condition of indigenous populations who are managing various lands, silently in these objects, you find evidence that there is acknowledgement and then you pull that apart and then you ask us to theorize, what is this preexisting condition? Is it preexisting? Is it kind of primordial? Is it primary? Is it godly? And so that's just kind of my commentary. And so I have kind of three questions. The first is that you're both wonderfully and very deliberately want us to differentiate between explicit statements of racialization or of differentiation and implicit ones. And I mean, Brenna, you say this more explicitly, but I think Mabel also does this. And I wonder, you're basically asking us to say, okay, there are moments where the law or persons in government make explicit distinctions. They say, well, that's because some persons are born inferior or something like that or belong to the wrong class. And then there are other more implicit moments where such hierarchies are invoked. How does this help us think, and this is a question to both of you, about the relationship not only between two competing claims to land or to property or to governance, but three. Because it seems to me that this is always what's at stake, especially in Mabel's paper, that it's not only that there's the question of whether enslavement will occur on one side of the line or not, but that there's this third aspect, third element, third option of governance that has to be dealt with. So to what extent is that why we should think about sort of explicit claims and implicit claims? The second question I have is, yeah, I've just given them all and you can talk. The second question I have is about his unbelievable quotation you have, Brenna, about how U.S. colonization was a more condensed version of all imperial history. Efficiently, the Americans were taking to a logical extreme a tendency that had emerged in the 18th century of British colonial practice that you just sublimate everything into a matter of land purchasing. So this seems to me works very differently than an idea about genealogy that we're gonna trace the history of things and uncover origins or that land claims today have to be traced to the very original moment because you're operating through analogy, through metonymy and both of you are doing this, that it's not only that we should trace to the very source or the very core by descendants or something like that who really has an original claim, but on the contrary, there's always a, almost literary in a kind of perverse literature, I suppose, metonymic, metaphorical and embodied material recursion happening. So how is this different? That's my second question. How is this different from the usual critiques which have been necessary and useful, right? Critiquing a material possession and kinship having to do one another or in the case of Mabel, critiquing that property and racialization obey the same gesture. That's a very different critique than saying you're critiquing the idea of a genetic link or critiquing sort of ethnographic critique, right? So I can imagine that in Mabel's case, you also have a chapter on the Smithsonian Institution which is enshrining a kind of ethnography that separates out indigenous people entirely and also builds a building to that. That's very different than this other idea that there's a kind of recursive value being given to bloodlines, to material bodies basically, as being analogous to governance, analogous to law. Do you see what I'm saying? So those are my kind of questions. We also have some questions in Q and A in the chat and maybe I'll start with Brenna since I sort of cited a couple of your passages first. Sure. Thanks so much for your really thoughtful engagement with these papers. I think on the first question about trying to sort of, trying to look at what's explicit and implicit in these laws or in pieces of legislation, I think it's, and I see Mabel doing the same, well, I think we're trying to do a similar sort of work which is to not just look at what is explicitly written in the laws and then what is implicit in terms of reading between the lines or reading the absences in the text. I think what this sort of work involves is really trying to grapple with what is excluded. Well, there's several parts to it. One is what exactly is the nature of the work that these laws are doing, right? And then a second part of it is to really grapple with what is being excluded. In this process of abstraction, law is always just a meta abstraction, as you mentioned. What kinds of deracination are taking place? And then how do we want to dwell in that place? How do we want to, what are the implications of trying to uncover the underbelly of this legal form in a way? I guess this is part of the project, right? And so much work has been done in this vein in terms of thinking about the archives that we use then. And then how do you, in a sense, you're kind of creating different archives in the process of trying to read law in this way or trying to understand law in this way. And so I think that that's how I would understand the work that I'm trying to do. And I think Mabel is doing as well. And that I've become more interested now in looking at the preamble to the legislation. So whereas before, I think I was more interested in just trying to understand what sort of regime of private property is being envisioned and imposed through these acts in trying to really think about the constitutive binds between settlers and then the colonial state, looking at the way in which subjectivity is produced through these proclamations, through these legislative acts, I think is quite, is quite a rich sort of seam to mine to understand our contemporary moment, right? I think in terms of the that quote from Alan Greer that you mentioned. Yeah, so I think there's, I think that preemption is operating both in an analogous way to international law doctrines, but then also there is this genealogy that I'm trying to trace with other scholars as well, right? So the analogy that, I mean, René Gouha writes about this in relationship to the British that they acted as if they were a landlord with an estate in Bengal, right? This is in the rule of property from Bengal. And so Alan Greer is making a similar point about the way that the US operated as reducing what are conflicts between sovereign nations into a real estate dispute. And this is the same thing we see happening now, not only in North America at sites where land defenders come into contestation with corporations and the state where those conflicts are reduced down to a real estate issue. It's what we see happening in East Jerusalem. It's what we see happening in the West Bank. I mean, this is happening very much in Palestine. It's the same kind of logic, right? As we are here having this webinar. And so preemption involves and colonial land regimes involve an internalization of international legal doctrines of conquest doctrine of discovery and the same logics. But as I was trying to show in relationship to the property doctrine of preemption and this idea of the rate of first refusal, we can see how it's also the contortion and the kind of perversion of land law doctrines deriving from the British common law that are contorted and then used to take indigenous land in the colonial settler context. So I think it's both analogy and genealogy. And then I will pass it over to Mabel before getting into a discussion again about kinship. Mabel, take it away. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a really, really, you know, a really great question. And it just led me to think about it. Actually, I think the example of what's going on in Jerusalem is a really good one. But I also think it brings up something I've been thinking about but have not sorted it out. Is, you know, the dependence on, let's say, you know, the Western and onto episteme on one, I think I should point out a desire or search for origins, right? And I think it's a desire to find, which comes out of clearly Judeo-Christianity, we must find the origins of something. But also the desire to have law, rule or no most, right? That there has to be some kind of governing structure, right? You know, that then produces whatever the world was or is, or, you know, by the 19th century will be. And then the third point is the role of difference in valuation, right? That there has to be some sort of ascribed valuation that then can produce hierarchies, right? You know, how we're imagining. And I don't know, I mean, I think in both our papers that seems to be somehow, all of those things somehow seem to be working in concert to sort of structure these landscapes, right? That we see different claims being made at different moments, right? And all the while, I think it's true. I think I appreciate, Brenna, your discussion of recursivity, you know, the formation of property. Because I was thinking about the way in which you describe the need to lay waste in order to then claim. But I would say that it's also true to the creation of the slave. You have to lay to waste kinship. You have to lay to waste the freedom. You have to lay to waste who this person was in order to reduce the new subject, right? Of the Negro, right? Or the slave as well. But also in all of both those processes, I would say of both landed people is the production of documents, right? Or the ledgers are the surveys, right? That define the properties that are valuable of whether it's the land or the person, right? And so there's something about, you know, these methods, which in and of themselves are also contradictory. Like they're not, you know, they're making legible, but they're also producing a legibility. They rely on reason, but they're wholly unreasonable, right? Which is exactly why I became interested. So why are these monuments to freedom, liberty, and justice built on land dispossessed? That is in fact built by enslaved labor. Like that to me is a profound contradiction. Yeah, I also think that there's a slight difference between the, let's say the laying, as you just put it very nicely, the laying to waste of a person's belonging and personhood in order to turn them into, you know, slave, enslaved labor. But then there's a difference between, let's say, the paper title and the work that that paper title does or that the law does or that the declaration of law does. Then the work that, let's say, that instrument does, the chain or the, I can imagine, the person walking around with that tool. You know, that's a different tool. I mean, now we're using the word tool to refer to everything, but the person walking or the black survey you're just describing, that person is performing a completely different sort of role in that entire laying to waste, because he's walking around with the chain, with the tool of authority that has a kind of promise and projection that goes beyond any declaration that could be made. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would just simply, like the land, you know, that the land and the human are the same in the sense that you're literally taking the land out of its, let's say geological connections to waters and trees and everything that moves through it, right? I mean, you're literally extracting it, sizing it from its context, right? You're fencing it in, you're enclosing it, right? You can cut off the water if you want. You can cut off passage of animals if you want, right? As we see with border conditions. I do think the question, you know, that I'm asking, which is why, you know, Banneker is an interesting figure because Jefferson is making claims about who has the capacity and the aptitudes to be able to engage in both the arts and sciences, which is why a figure like Phyllis Wheatley to him is impossible. How could this black woman have any understanding, right? Of the world of ideas and also of beauty. And yet she's very strategic, you know, as is Banneker, not only in terms of what their intelligence, you know, and their ability to produce these narratives, whether it's as Almanac or her poetry, we'll do in terms of making claims to let's say freedom, which both of their writings do, but also economic dependence, independence, right? They also understand capitalism. I see, right, right. In terms of the way in which their work circulates. So there's a way in which they're leveraging, right? You know, whatever their subjectivity as free and black within the context in which they are living with all of its contradictions and problematics. Yeah, I mean that brings up the, and I know Brenna wants to get back in, but someone is asking more has asked the question about the relationship between the theological origins of property and this idea of good faith. We're hearing all about oaths and faith. And so his question is, is this legal concept of good faith? Has anything to do with religious idea of virtue? Like what is the connection? Is it really just a kind of already state institutionalized version of saying, of invoking God? Or is it, what is the relationship between the two? And my sort of addition to that is simply to say that it seems like a last resort claim, frankly. It seems like a last resort instrument to say, oh, we shall be in good faith in dealing with this. Or there shall be a godly in a similar way as Jefferson has to at some point refer to God in order to keep ignoring the evidence that he has in front of him. So two questions. One, what is one more factual? What is the role of actual institutions of faith or religious idea of virtue in these claims to faith? And secondly, do you, my question, which is, do you think that this is other stages and levels at which we can say these, these, in the last instance, a claim to faith or to good faith or to virtue or to habitude is being made in these legal instruments? I mean, I'm not equipped to answer. That's a huge question. I think we can say that we know that the common law is ensconced within a theological framework, right? That's not a controversial claim to make that this is the whole critique of secularism that Talal Assad and many others now have, have made for the last few decades, which help us understand Peter Fitzpatrick's work. I mean, you know, they help us see the theological structure of the, of modern law. And so when we take that insight into the realm of property where Locke is trying to secularize the divine foundations of property ownership, but obviously he doesn't pull it off, right? You know, what, what I'm trying to think through is that if we have this theological, you know, kind of the, if the infrastructure of modern law is still tied to those ideas and those concepts, then what are the racial and gendered and kind of heteronormative aspects of that sort of infrastructure, which I don't think that they have been pulled out enough in property studies, you know, and thinking about, I mean, I mean, this is where anthropology and feminist, you know, and queer critiques of kinship coming out of anthropology and adjacent disciplines and then also for mostly the work of black feminist scholars, you know, have, have kind of, I think opened up avenues for critical thinking on this regard. So that, that's where I match right now with this thinking. Yeah. And maybe I think that the, what you just said before on these sort of actors who are deploying strategically the tools that they have, that seems to me that it's a kind of blurring of the public, private slash commercial slash political realms, but it's very similar to in a completely different realm to what's happening in law, which is that, yeah, that private ownership of your house is being equated to or is being deployed for the sake of, for the sake of, you know, managing the relationship between state for the sake of managing governmentality, basically. So I can't remember what my question about kinship was. I'm just fascinated by that, that way in which a critique of kinship, which is, oh, I remember the question. How is your critique of kinship in a way different, this one than existing ones? There's quite a bit and a strong body of work, which we of course read and, but again, does not necessarily have this kind of analogical jump, let's say. And honestly, I'm thinking specifically, and this goes along with the question I asked about implicit and explicit, there's a tendency in contemporary restitution discourse and even in contemporary, let's say, educational circles to say that what we need to do is acknowledge our frameworks have aged and acknowledged that we no longer believe, that we change our language so that we don't no longer refer to persons in a certain way, and that way we absolve ourselves of the class of person from, you know, violences of the past. And it seems to me that thinking in terms of kinship that is not kinship that is dependent upon bloodline, that kinship that is dependent upon order of birth or something like that, forces us to not be able to have resource to that, right? It can no longer be that looking at history, looking at legal history, looking at past violences can be remedied with basically class actions, class discursive gestures. Does that sound right? Or is it more complicated than that? Well, I think what I'm trying to do is to take all of the, you know, understand these critiques of kinship. We know that kinship has operated, the hegemonic dominant model of kinship has operated as pretty central to tools of dispossession, enslavement, et cetera, right? But I'm trying to think about how all of the critical engagements with the idea of kinship and the deconstruction of the notion of bloodline, et cetera also help us see in a more, less, a liberatory way, but we can kind of see the negative oppressive ways in which that is still operating because, and, you know, so if kinship is still tied to notions of inheritance and ownership and entitlement and titles that are not now even referencing the fiction of bloodline, but are encased in a racial schema, right? You know, how has that been transferred generationally so that in our contemporary moment, we still see this operating? I mean, I was talking about situations of policing and the relationship between the state and very different groups of people trying to assert control over public space or indeed in the case of indigenous people take back their land, right? But we can think about this in the forms of lethal violence that we see being inflicted on racialized people, indigenous, black, brown, et cetera, that for me is still wrapped up in this structure, right? Whereby the, you know, what some people, Mountain and Harney, Ruth Wilson-Gilmore, talk about the deputization of sovereign power, right? To individual settlers. Like that is what we're living with now. So how do we understand the history that's given rise to this petty sob, the figure of the petty sovereign or, you know, that process of deputization? Yeah, that's super helpful. This leads me to maybe ask one last question on behalf because people have to go to class and such. Manuel Schwarzberg is asking, going on to the theological theme again, but his final question in a way could be broadened. His question was, is the theological much closer to everyday design practice than we think, particularly around the disciplines that practically enforce the world of racial colonial capitalism? And in a way, I wonder if, Mabel, you could answer this, not only in the question of the theological, but how much does this deputization that Brenna just cited occur still in design disciplines, et cetera, that there's a kind of habituation to these frameworks and passing down of the frameworks through design acts, and not only through legal acts or acts of, you know, acts that seem in your two papers very primordial because they're occurring on, you know, a long time ago on lands that don't have as much accumulated to building on them. Mabel, do you want to maybe comment on that? Sure. I mean, I think that these positions, you know, of racialization or how someone, you know, gets identified, you know, as let's say white person, you know, it's through, you know, a set of ideas and practices and institutions and so forth of whiteness, right? I mean, I think that's absolutely right. And therefore, you know, you can get the kind of contradictory position of a black person basically enacting the violence of white supremacy as we recently saw in Memphis. You know, I think someone asked about indigenous, were the indigenous enslaved? Yes, they were. And they were also slave owners, as were black people. I mean, it's a complicated, you know, kind of set of subject positions and the ways in which people operate within larger systems of economies and governance and so on. And so I think it's useful to understand how are those power relations structured? And in what ways might we do otherwise? Like how might we set up different sets of relations? Because I just think it's really the critical, the critical question is how do we, you know, yes, we can live without capitalism because there was a world before capitalism or liberalism, or, you know, I do think that that is possible, but the question is in what ways do we live as humans together, right? Within whatever these other possible relations might be. Yeah, that's really, I mean, the question of relationality has been kind of key to all of our guests and conversations on land where there's not this kind of apparent historical break that wasn't one and we are all trying to repair discursively, you know, to thread the story along. And I do think that just to make a final nod, Brenna's work on property has been really, in the disciplines of the built environment, it really key, it was a key moment where we were able to think relationality but also spatially. And so it's been a great sort of jumping board with a number of reflections essentially about how privilege, how, yeah, how design privilege and how the disciplines of the built environment, you know, handed down certain things in the same manner as properties handed down. That's a concept that sort of the people in the fields of the built environment have really latched onto. And Mabel, I think that it's really thrilling to see that you're dealing with the people as the people who are, you know, not only building the big monuments but also wielding the chains and the instruments and the paper instruments. So we have to let our audience go. I haven't answered all of the questions. There was a couple of questions about how these combinations of legal and economic kinships help establishing contemporary settled colonial relations and land grabs, but I think we've kind of addressed those. And there was a broader question about, is there a difference between indigenous tribal settlements and enslaved people? But I think Mabel kind of addressed that, that you can actually borrow critical frameworks from those two conditions that have been typically theorized or historicized differently and separately and borrow strategically from one to rethink the relational condition under capitalism more broadly. So thank you both very much for sharing your papers with yourselves, with each other, with us, and for taking part in the seminar. And we'll look forward to having the books soon, please soon, the books and articles, please soon so we can assign them all to our students. And thank you all also for attending and we'll see you at some point. And again, if you want to watch any of these, they're again on our website at the Beall Center.