The Ruins of Settlement

Abstract

The third chapter, “The Ruins of Settlement,” asks if the colonial city can be a stable form with which to interpret the geographies and temporalities of climate catastrophe. Focusing on the intersecting policies of Indigenous relocation and urban renewal in and beyond the Twin Cities, the chapter argues that what it terms climate ruin is most accurately interpreted as being internal to the form of the colonial city. The textual centerpiece of the chapter is David Treuer’s novel The Hiawatha, which this chapter uses to theorize the dialectical relationship between climate ruin and colonial immunity that animates the reproduction of the city form. Treuer’s novel’s speculative historical attention to Indigenous kinship and labor amid the “renewing” city also throws the limits of colonial immunity into relief through its infrapolitical imagination of living with ruin.