THE SLOW VIOLENCE OF NATURAL HISTORY

22nd September 2021

Online

Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet and Métis) is an award winning Indigenous writer, ethnobotanist and environmental activist with a BA in physics and PhD in environmental history. She works within Indigenous communities to revitalise Indigenous & traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), to address environmental justice & the climate crisis, and to strengthen public policy for Indigenous languages.

Her talk, presented by Manchester Museum in association with ORIGINS, shared the story of how American science and natural history was “not viewed as violence at all,” but impacted the Blackfeet and other Indigenous peoples. It began with the military and scientific expedition of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery and it proceeded throughout the century. American science was built on a “violence of delayed destruction... dispersed across time and space,” without the consent or permission Indigenous communities. And its legacy fills museum and university collections today.