Harmon, Max 2018 Critical Geography Thesis

Title: In the Valley of the Giant: Plantation Geographies of the Lower Mississippi River Advisor: Nicholas Howe Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No

In the Valley of the Giant:

Plantation Geographies of the Lower Mississippi River

by Max Harmon

Professor Nicolas Howe, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Critical Geography

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 15th 2018 Harmon 2

Acknowledgements

This thesis owes itself first and foremost to the support of my friends and family whose care for me and the world have made this project possible and meaningful. Thank you as well you to Professor

Howe for helping me to formulate my major in Critical Geography, and for the many hours of advising and support. Thank you especially to Professor Howe for the last several months of dedicated advising on this project. Thank you to Professor Njoya for first suggesting the possibility of a contract major and for the continuing encouragement and invaluable feedback on this project. Thank you to Professor Hidalgo, whose class (and lending of books) in the spring of 2016 marked a turning point in my intellectual and personal development and whose perceptive comments helped clarify this project. Thank you to Professor

Eqeiq for a crucially important conversation in developing thoughts for this thesis, and for generally pushing my ideas and forms of expression. Without Professor James Manigault-Bryant’s class on “The

Plantation,” many of the ideas in this paper would not have cohered—thank you to JMB for his teaching and support. Although not a direct influence on this project, Professor Singham has had a profound impact on the ways I think about and engage the world. Thank you.

Much of this work came out of a shared experience on the Mississippi River in the fall of 2016 with my dear friend Brad Geismar. This thesis would not have been possible without the countless hours of conversations, reading, and collaborative learning with Brad. Thank you to Marylee, Michael, and Paul

Orr for their incredible generosity in sharing their insight and experience with Brad and I, and for their continuing and tireless work for the people of Louisiana. I was honored to have the opportunity to speak with Dr. Beverly Wright in an incredibly powerful and informative interview that deeply impacted my lines of inquiry in this project. Thank you to Dr. Wright for taking the time to speak with me and for all the work you have done in supporting communities fighting environmental racism.

But in addition to the positive contribution of friends, family, teachers, and mentors, this thesis also rests upon (as I intend to make clear) the ongoing structural violence that supports the position of my scholarship and institutions like Williams College. It is to this reality that I seek to make my work accountable. Harmon 3

Harmon 4

Introduction

Prophesy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection: it is space not time that hides consequences from us. -John Berger, Ways of Seeing

In 1858, Marie Adrien Persac and Benjamin Moore Norman created and published a map known as Norman’s Chart of the Lower Mississippi River.1 The map follows the course of the

Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi to New Orleans, Louisiana. The map details over two hundred and fifty miles of river and hundreds of plantations flanking the banks. Destrehan,

Fagot, Labranche, Marmillion—the map is a window into the rectangular grid of property ownership in 1858, a grid crystallizing the relationships between cotton and cane, slave and master, land and water. The map shows a river with clearly defined banks, plantations with hard borders, colors signifying whether the land is covered by cotton or cane. The space and time this map depicts is organized. Blue and red mean cotton, green and yellow mean sugar cane, this line is the river, that symbol is a church. The map claims to contain this landscape under the organizing principles at its disposal.

Yet the map is bursting at its seams. There at the top, beneath the ink that marks a city, is the place where the indigenous Natchez massacred a French garrison in an effort to stop encroaching settlement. There, under the green of the sugar cane was the start of the largest slave rebellion in the United States, a transgression of the dark lines of plantation borders. It has been covered over, but the river flooded all along the western bank, land and water mixing in the muddy flow. Beneath the organizational grid of Norman’s chart, beneath the legally and cartographically codified property lines, are a series of unstable structures. Congealed within the socio-spatial organization of the plantation, so neatly and smoothly represented by this map, is an

1 Persac, Marie Adrien & Norman, Benjamin Moore. “Norman's chart of the lower Mississippi River,” J.H. Colton & Co 1858, Library of Congress: Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/78692178/ Harmon 5 ongoing history of dispossession and violence. Both beneath and within the ink of Norman’s chart are formative and interlocking systems of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalist accumulation. By tracking the spatiality of the antebellum plantation, as its organizing principles continue to ripple across time and space, a shaken, disrupted, and altogether unstable landscape begins to emerge.

The Mississippi River flows from North to South—from the headwaters of Lake Itasca to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. Its flow created the landmass of its southern stretch: sediment transfer that built the delta of landmasses now called Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.2 The incredibly nutrient rich soils of this lower section of river, called the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, were the ecological underpinning of the particular plantation geography captured in Norman’s chart. While plantations in what would become the United States existed from Virginia to South

Carolina to Texas, the stretch along the lower Mississippi River ultimately concentrated a density of large estates and enslaved people greater than any other region of the antebellum south.3

(fig. 1)4

2 Cox, Randel Tom; “A Geologiests Perspective on the Mississippi Delta,” in Defining the Delta ed. Janelle Collins, University of Arkansas Press 2015, pg 17 3 See fig. 1 and fig. 2 from Hilliard, Sam Bowers, Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture, Louisiana State University Press, 1984 4 Hilliard, Sam Bowers. Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture. Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Pg. 36 Harmon 6

(fig. 2)5

In the Mississippi Alluvial Valley in the 19th century, the southern flow of the river brought slaves instead of sediment. Northern movement along the river became associated with the movement of commodities, especially cotton to feed Northern industry. One axis of the plantation and its legacy is North/South: water, commodities, capital, and enslaved people moved up and down the river, connecting distant locations in a material chain. The mere directionality of movement on the Mississippi carried with it implicit relations of power and violence, such that southern transit on the Mississippi for a slave, "the threat of being 'sold down the river,' was seen as tantamount to a death sentence.”6 On the plantations detailed by Norman’s chart, the river also provided the potential for northern movement for slaves, who escaped slavery “in numbers that dismayed their masters. The owner of one escaped slave declared that

5 ibid, 43. 6 Sandlin, Lee. Wicked River: the Mississippi When it Last Ran Wild. Vintage, 2010. Pg. 121. Harmon 7 slaves in the Mississippi Valley were ‘held by the most uncertain tenure by reason of the facilities held out’ for escape by steamboats.”7

While the North/South axis of the Mississippi includes chattel slavery and commodity flow as central features of the plantation geography, the Mississippi River also became a primary landmark across which the East/West axis of US settler colonialism pressed in the 19th century.

The Mississippi that flows through the orderly map of property ownership contains the power relations of chattel slavery and settler colonialism within its waters. By looking at the plantations along the Mississippi River, the East/West geography of displacement of the Choctaw, Natchez,

Tunica, Chitimacha, Houma, Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw becomes central to understanding the plantation.

Prioritizing the East/West axis of settler colonialism clearly marks the violent imposition of the settler state and its institutions as the “site of originary violence,” and reduces the potential for a historical reading of a North/South axis that glorifies the North as a zone of liberation in contrast to the South.8 A claim for indigenous territorial sovereignty cannot be integrated into the historical North/South narrative of racial progress by a liberal democratic state that is always already a settler state. As Jodi Byrd writes,

The tensions between…North/South, and East/West are instructive here because they are, ultimately, U.S. national geographies demarcated by similar elisions and competing cacophonies of race, colonialism, and imperialism that enjamb settlers, arrivants and natives into a competition for hegemonic signification.9

With this in mind, it is crucial that any engagement with the geography of the antebellum plantation must highlight both indigenous dispossession and genocide and African enslavement as constitutive of the landscape, or risk forcing “arrivants and natives into a competition for

7 Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams. Harvard University Press, 2013. Pg. 7 8 Byrd, Jodi . The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. U of Minnesota Press, 2011. pg. 12 9 Byrd, 12. Harmon 8 hegemonic signification” within the structure of my argument.10 The Mississippi not only contains both North/South and East/West histories of chattel slavery and Indian Removal, but also more contemporary links between sites of anti-black and anti-indigenous violence. Today, the water that flows past the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation ends up next to African-American communities founded during reconstruction between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The oil that flows past the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation also ends up along this same stretch of river— the same stretch captured in Norman’s chart—now often called “Cancer Alley” or the “Chemical

Corridor.” These flows of both water and oil are under the managerial control of the Army Corps of Engineers, and together entangle antebellum plantations, Standing Rock, and Cancer Alley into a constellation connected by spatial practices of domination.

Just as cotton and cane plantations were integral to US capitalism in the 19th century, the contemporary political economy is built to a large extent upon the geographic nexus of fossil fuel/petrochemical/agribusiness. By 1858, as historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockam explain,

Slave-grown cotton was the most valuable export made in America, the capital stored in slaves exceeded the combined value of all the nation's railroads in factories, foreign investment underwrote the expansion of plantation lands in Louisiana and Mississippi, and the highest concentration of steam power in United States was to be found along the Mississippi rather than the Merrimack.11

In 2018, almost eighty percent of the world’s feed grains and soybeans come from the

Mississippi basin where over ninety percent of US agricultural exports are produced—over sixty percent of grain produced for export in the US is barged down the Mississippi through the Port

10 It is also crucial to note that especially in what is called the Southeastern United States, many people live and have lived at the intersection of blackness and indigeneity. The history of maroons and indigenous peoples in Louisiana, the Cherokee as slaveholders, and the innumerable points of contact between descendants of enslaved Africans and indigenous people have meant that many people live both as African-Americans and Native Americans. My separation of African-Americans and Native-Americans is not an attempt to deny the subjectivity, history, or community of those who live both categories. Instead, this analytic separation is necessary because the plantation was constituted by the distinct yet interrelated regimes of chattel slavery and “Indian Removal.” 11 Beckert, Sven, and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. pg. 1 Harmon 9 of New Orleans.12 This agricultural production is underpinned by the fossil fuel/petrochem/ agribusiness nexus between Baton Rouge and New Orleans which contains almost twenty percent of the US’s oil refining capacity and several of its largest oil refineries, grain elevators, and chemical manufacturers. The state of Louisiana has over 125,000 miles of pipeline, and ranks first and second in crude oil and natural gas production.13 Louisiana is both a site of massive extraction, and a hub for crude oil and gas coming from across the United States.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in commodities move up and down the river each year, and the combined worth of corporations on the sites of former plantations easily reaches tens of trillions of dollars.

Not long after the rebellion that became the Haitian revolution, the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States occurred along a stretch of the Mississippi from the Andry

Plantation to the Fortier Planation—land currently occupied by Shell, Union Carbide, Valero,

Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, and International Matex Tank Terminals. In 1811, the rebellion led by Charles Deslondes marched along the levee, killing whites and burning plantations.

Before they could make it to New Orleans, Deslondes and the group of enslaved people and maroons who had come together to overthrow the regime of slavery were overwhelmed by a

U.S. Army detachment. Most were killed in the fight, on the ground now owned by the

Cornerstone Chemical Company. Deslondes was brutally maimed and buried alive, and many others were hung. Along the levee, that physical barrier built by slave labor to hold back the river, “the heads of those executed at Destrehan [a nearby plantation] were put up on pikes…between New Orleans and the German Coast” as a demonstration of the Plantation

12 National Park Service, Mississippi River Facts, https://www.nps.gov/miss/riverfacts.htm Accessed March 27, 2018 13 Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, Industry Sectors, http://www.lmoga.com/industry-sectors/ Accessed March 27, 2018. Louisiana ranks first in crude oil production and second in natural gas production when the Outer Continental Shelf is included—these are deep sea operations regulated by the federal government. Harmon 10 regime’s reclamation of the riverscape as a material and symbolical site of black death.14 Today, this same stretch of river holds some of the highest levels of African-American poverty and cancer incidence in the United States among some of the most profitable corporations in the history of the world. The stretch of river and land captured in Norman’s chart is clearly crucial to understanding the U.S. in 1858: the property relations, flood controls, territorial boundaries, labor regimes, and agricultural practices reveal strategies of domination inherent to constructing the 19th century plantation. This same stretch of river clearly remains vital to 21st century U.S. political economy. How are we to understand these spatial coincidences and resonances? What is the relationship between the antebellum plantation and the contemporary geography of fossil fuel, petrochemicals and agribusiness?

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Persistent plantation geographies underlie contemporary fossil fuel, petrochemical, and agribusiness operations. To make this connection, I highlight specific spatial practices of antebellum domination: dispossession, land ownership, river control, and capital, commodity, and waste flows. I argue that the spatial practices that built the antebellum plantation have persisted beyond the end of chattel slavery, the fall of cotton prices, and up to the present day.

Chattel slavery, Indian Removal, and the Mississippi River did not simply exist alongside each other in the 19th century, rather, they were inextricably connected by the strategies of Planters,

Senators, and Engineers in order to capture, maintain, and naturalize power. The plantation as a geography materialized and ossified relations of antebellum power in landholdings, river infrastructure, and institutions designed to engineer the landscape.

Unifying this genealogy of dominant plantation geography is a reworking of Katherine

McKittrick’s notion of “the uninhabitable” and Traci Brynne Voyles’ theory of “wastelanding.”

14 Johnson, 21. Harmon 11

McKittrick argues that “the uninhabitable” is an understanding of space originating in the colonial encounter. The colonial characterization of the Mississippi Valley as unlivable swamp, as wasted land, created an uninhabitable geography in which settler violence was logically precluded—those who lived in the unlivable could not be murdered, and land underwater could not be stolen: “The uninhabitable—in particular, the landmasses occupied by those who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were unimaginable, both spatially and corporeally—is the geographic (non)location through which the plantation emerged.”15 For McKittrick, the plantation is an organization of life and death, where “some live in the unlivable, and to live in the unlivable condemns the geographies of [the] marginalized to death over and over again.”16

Writing about uranium mining on Navajo land in the 20th century, Traci Brynne Voyles develops a theory of wastelanding: “the discursive process of rendering a space marginal, worthless, and pollutable” along lines of race, gender, and coloniality.17 “To wasteland a space,”

Voyles argues, “is to defend the notion that the land is, always has been, and always will be

‘empty except for Indians’: to mark it and make it, ultimately, sacrificial land.”18 Voyle’s work can be powerfully applied to 18th century renderings of the Mississippi Valley as wasted swampland that justified the settler project. Her work also speaks to later colonial projects to produce indigenous land as amenable to oil and gas infrastructure. Together with McKittrick’s work, notions of wastelanding and the production of uninhabitable geographies suggest a theoretical frame to think about plantation strategies of domination. According to an extension of

McKittrick’s logic, the descendants of slave communities along the Mississippi have been

15 McKittrick, Katherine. "Plantation Futures." Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 6. McKittrick does not suggest these constructions are historically static, but she does not focus on cyclic processes of condemnation and redemption or their specific relevance to dynamic capitalist accumulation. 16 Ibid. 17 Voyles, Traci Brynne. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 9 18 Voyles, 26 Harmon 12 systematically poisoned by industry in part because they inhabit “geographies of the racial other,” “emptied out of life precisely because the historical constitution of these geographies has cast them as the lands of no one,” as fundamentally uninhabitable.

However, I want to build off McKittrick’s notion of the “uninhabitable” and Voyles’ theory of “wastelanding” to suggest three complementary points. First, the contemporary racial and colonial geographies along the Mississippi are not only historically static constructions of places and people “made to function as our ‘waste products.’”19 A genealogy of the plantation shows precisely how the “historical constitution” of these geographies has changed over time, and that “the notion that the land is, always has been, and always will be ‘empty except for

Indians’” has been paired with the claim that those in power can redeem the land. I argue that the production of uninhabitability is a necessarily dynamic and ongoing process that reconstitutes uninhabitable places as habitable and back again. While Voyles focuses on the ways discursive wastelanding has been a force of dispossession, I want to add the ways material processes of redemption also function to dispossess. The plantation has been able to attenuate crises and increase profits precisely on its ability to condemn and subsequently redeem geographies of the racial and colonial other. These uninhabitable places include the swamp, the floodplain, the reservation, the agricultural wasteland, and “Cancer Alley.” Their redemptive corollary includes the plantation house, the levee, the oil rig, the refinery, and the green buffer zone.

Second, I argue that producing uninhabitable geographies is not only profitable for planters and corporations at the back end of their operations—in that passing on the costs of hard labor, pollution, community destruction, loss of health, and ecological devastation is cheap—but also that the production of uninhabitable geographies is actually crucial for the front end of plantation accumulation as well. Places emptied of value produce cheap labor, cheap land, and

19 ibid. Harmon 13 have allowed the plantation to attenuate crises via dispossession. Viewed through this lens, environmental racism is not simply capitalism saving costs at the expense of the health of communities of color; it is also the preparation of a landscape ready to be consumed. Gidwani and Marginganti, writing about the Indian city of Bholakpur, call this the “waste-value dialectic.”20

In other words, the uneven geographies of race and coloniality that exist today are not only an ongoing ideological legacy of slavery and indigenous genocide, but also a structural necessity for the reproduction of the plantation power structure, and perhaps by extension, the capitalist economy in general. Plantation production, in keeping with McKittrick and Voyles’ analyses, necessarily produces people and places as waste, as uninhabitable, and does so along existing grids of power that have direct material linkages to chattel slavery and Indian Removal.

The physical infrastructures and uneven geographies that were produced by the antebellum plantation both concretize and act back upon racial and colonial ideologies. I argue that this process has only been half of the reproduction of plantation relations, in that “wastelanding” has also allowed for the “cannibalization” of those places of produced uninhabitability. While the production of uninhabitable geographies is certainly also a discursive process, I will focus on the material dimensions of uninhabitability: the ways in which land has been selectively flooded, poisoned, and wasted. In addition, I chart the redemption of these uninhabitable landscapes through flood control, fossil fuel infrastructure, and more recent “corporate responsibility” practices that have allowed for the reproduction of the Plantation via ongoing dispossession.

Thirdly, I argue that the production of “the uninhabitable” serves not only the reproduction of plantation power, but also to naturalize violent relations between people by

20 Gidwani, Vinay, and Anant Maringanti. "The Waste-Value Dialectic: Lumpen Urbanization in Contemporary India." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 1 (2016): pg. 114. Harmon 14 discursively elevating the agency of ecological systems. The spatial strategies I track have created “an embodied experience of structural, environmental insecurity” in which exposure and vulnerability to toxins and flooding is unevenly distributed along racial and colonial lines.21

Planters and Engineers constructed “the Valley of the Giant” to contain the violence of this uneven geography by attributing structural insecurity to the agency of non-human systems, specifically the Mississippi River.22 They do so even while the particular configuration of power is based upon the hyper-rationalization and objectification of those same systems. Through accounts of Indian Removal, river management, and toxic pollution, I demonstrate the way in which conditions of structural insecurity and the “exposure of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death”23 are produced by the Valley of the Giant: a geography that naturalizes violence by discursively distributing destructive agency to ecological systems and redemptive agency to those in power.

The antebellum river plantation is a fitting site to begin thinking about the condemnation and redemption of geographies because its genealogy so clearly shows both massive changes to landscape over the last two centuries and the persistence of its power structure. The uninhabitable swamp became the plantation through spatial strategies of flood control, dispossession, and violently demarcated property lines. The agricultural plantation in turn became its own wasteland through ecological devastation of soils, drops in commodity prices, the inability to control labor, and flooding. The agricultural plantation was redeemed by finance capital, fossil fuel, petrochemical, and agribusiness corporations, increased flood control, and the

21 Dillon, Lindsey and Julie Sze. "Police Power and Particulate Matters: Environmental Justice and the Spatialities of In/Securities in U.S. Cities," English Language Notes 54(2): 13. Dillon and Sze are working to connect the violences of environmental racism and police brutality. 22 The Army Corps of Engineers and the US Department of Agriculture routinely refer to the Mississippi as “the Giant.” See Clay, Floyd M. A Century on the Mississippi: A History of the Memphis District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 1876-1981. US Army Corps of Engineers, June 1986 23 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, 28. Harmon 15 transformation of the riverscape into an industrial zone. The industrial riverscape created toxic wastelands: wastelands that are now being redeemed by the very corporations and government agencies that produced them through buyout and buffer programs which continue to dispossess people “living in the unlivable.” This genealogy cautions against a reliance on “sacrifice zones” as way of understanding the distribution of environmental and economic harms, as it is precisely settler capital’s ability to redeem such zones that has justified continual spatial extension and dispossession.

My argument proceeds chronologically, focusing on the antebellum period, the post- bellum era, and the contemporary solidification of fossil fuel, petrochemicals, and agribusiness along the Mississippi. While I narrate a temporal sequence, my intent is to create a spatial sketch of each era: the flows of commodities and capital, the mechanisms and institutions of river control, and the movement of people. My chapter subheadings mark particular spatial strategies that maintained and naturalized plantation relations. In each era, I seek to create a map that connects the lower Mississippi to Standing Rock, and that includes a topography of value: what places and people contain value from the perspective of power? Thus, this piece of writing is best compared to three maps overlaid on each other. I am not making an argument that claims to capture perfect historical continuity between them, but rather a suggestion that putting them together can provide robust connections between St. James and Standing Rock made explicable through spatial strategies of the plantation.24

In the antebellum period, I contextualize the Mississippi River plantation as a settler colonial installation and as an essential site for US capitalist development. I do so by tracking the way in which creating plantations relied upon military violence, slave patrols, and river

24 St. James Parish is located along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. It is home to 21,000 people and various fossil fuel operations including a large petroleum reserve that holds oil from the Bakken Oil Shale in North Dakota. Harmon 16 engineering to create the conditions under which landscapes became livable or unlivable for different subjects. Institutions such as the General Land Office, the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Corps of Topographical Engineers grew out of these processes and played a part in the project of Indian Removal. In addition, I follow flows of commodity and capital foundational to the antebellum plantation to firmly situate river plantations as a site connected to Northern industrial accumulation and westward colonial expansion. I argue that the antebellum plantation from the perspective of Planters was not just about organizing and disciplining labor, but was about organizing flows of value in general. Not only did the Plantation seek to keep slaves in the field, but also to engineer a river that stayed behind its banks, to maintain credit’s steady flow, and to expedite commodity movement upriver. From the perspective of Planters, control of the river, patrolling/policing of borders, commodity movement, capital mobility, and control of black labor were mutually constitutive projects.

In the post-bellum era, I focus on the ways the antebellum geography persisted and changed under different strategies of labor management, river control, land ownership, commodity value, and capital availability. This section maps out the ways Plantation capitalism navigated the loss of ownership over slave labor power, the depreciation in the value of cotton and sugar cane, and the ecological destruction of value imbedded in topsoil. After trying a variety of strategies to maintain control over African-American labor, Planters and government agencies began to transform the landscape to render obsolescent African-American labor and to dispossess African-Americans of land. The cotton and cane plantations became agricultural wastelands, creating a picture of an empty landscape that discursively erased African-American communities, ultimately allowing for their further dispossession via the redemptive power of industrialization. This section also sees the consolidation of Army Corps of Engineers’ power Harmon 17 over land and water, and the transformation of overt colonial violence into more subtle (though no less destructive) forms of dispossession via planned flooding in the service of an ever- expanding settler-capitalist economy.

The third section tracks the “fossil fuel fix” that transformed the land of Norman’s Chart into an industrial zone—ameliorating crises of commodity devaluation, reliance on African-

American labor, and ecological collapse. With a tight focus on particular ownership exchanges of plantation parcels, this section shows the way dispossession continues to be a fundamental feature of plantation production—targeting both indigenous and African-American communities.

It charts the purchase of plantations by corporations, Jim Crow labor exclusions, toxic pollution, and community buyouts. Both in Louisiana and North Dakota, the production of uninhabitability by the Army Corps and corporate polluters has continued to empty African-American and indigenous communities of value so they might be more easily consumed in the extraction, transportation, and refinement of commodities. This section demonstrates the way corporations have more recently claimed the ability to redeem uninhabitable geographies they had previously condemned, raising concern over corporate integration of environmental justice critiques into their own operation and spatial claims.25

I conclude with a look at the slippages and instabilities that make possible alternative geographies—the way strategies of domination can disclose the profound instability of seemingly impermeable structures. Processes of power and domination are neither smooth nor inevitable, but are resisted at every turn by human agency and by ecological patterns that transcend human control. Hegemonic landscapes are in fact profoundly unsteady, and it requires a great amount of effort to make them appear stable and natural. Just as Norman’s map hides as

25 This idea was inspired by Professor David Bond, who presented his work on the Alberta Tar Sands at Williams College in the fall of 2015. Harmon 18 much as it shows, so too can an “essentially physical view of space” hide the strategies of the

Plantation because such a view “imbue[s] all things spatial with a lingering sense of primordiality and physical composition, an aura of objectivity, inevitability, and reification.”26

The spatial organization of the plantation must be invigorated with the various kinds of agency, including non-human agency, which have created its form. It is essential to destabilize the

“natural” appearance of the Plantation: for only when we understand that "the space of nature is thus filled with politics and ideology, with relations of production” does it have “the possibility of being significantly transformed."27 I offer a set of structural openings, including the vulnerabilities of physical infrastructure, to point towards a crucial counter-genealogy of contestation and resistance to the plantation.

In pursuing the spatial strategies of domination that have produced and maintained plantation power structures, I potentially re-articulate the erasure of black and indigenous people as geographic and historical subjects. Because my interpretive frame focuses on strategies of domination, I am intentionally privileging a white, settler gaze on the landscape. Done poorly, I contribute to the ways “landscape serves to objectify those ‘in the view.’ To strip them of their subjectivity and invest it instead in the viewer.”28 The early accounts of plantations I use come from European colonial travelers on the Mississippi. I quote from petrochemical corporations’ websites. However, I seek to maintain an interpretive distance that does not merely reproduce dominant practices, but rather elucidates their ongoing logics so they might be more easily dismantled.

This structural analysis of capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy should

26 Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, 1989. Pg. 79 27 Soja, 121. 28 Mitchell, Don. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. pg. 11 Harmon 19 not be understood as subordinating other analyses of the Plantation. The strategies of domination, which I track through various moments in the Plantation’s changing landscape, were in direct contestation with the agency of marginalized subjects: practices of resistance, community formation, and meaning creation. Both as structural contestation and as cultural production, these counterhegemonic practices are crucial to understanding the plantation.

Similarly, uneven geographies of gender and sexuality were also crucial to the plantation: their absence in my analysis does not mean I take these topics to be epiphenomenal. The antebellum plantation was productive of racial-sexual norms and violences in addition to cotton and cane.29

Today’s fossil fuel/petrochem/agribusiness landscape also differentially distributes capital, commodities, and toxins along gendered lines with indigenous women and women of color bearing a disproportionate share of toxic exposure and economic insecurity.30 My macro scale and focus on strategies from above is thus necessarily incomplete.

Though limited, this analysis does have the power to draw crucial connections between contemporary sites of anti-indigenous, anti-black, and ecocidal violence. Motivated by a desire to better understand the connections between Standing Rock and the Chemical Corridor, I track patterns of land ownership, river control, and commodity/capital/waste flows from the antebellum plantation to our contemporary geographies of fossil fuel, petrochemicals, and agribusiness. I do so through the physical infrastructures (levees, pipelines, refineries), river system (Mississippi basin), and governing institutions (multinational corporations, US Army

29 For a necessary engagement with the gendered relations of the plantation, see: Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press on Demand, 1997. Collins, Patricia Hill. Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Vol. 7. U of Minnesota Press, 1998. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. U of Minnesota Press, 2006. Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Perdue, Theda. "Cherokee Women and the Trail of Tears." Journal of Women's History 1, no. 1 (1989): 14-30. 30 Stein, Rachel, New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism. Rutgers University Press, 2004, 1-8; LaDuke, Winona, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. South End Press, 1999, 18 Harmon 20

Corps of Engineers, US Department of Agriculture) that emerged and solidified out of the plantation system along the Mississippi River. My analysis is interpretive and draws on travel accounts, newspaper articles, films, maps, and interviews. I make limited use of quantitative data such as income and health statistics. My work is inspired by and builds from scholarship theorizing the history of slavery and capitalist development, indigenous critical theory, environmental history, and critical geography.

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A few hundred miles north of the site of Deslondes’ execution and a century and a half later, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who chaired the Lower Mississippi Delta Development

Commission (LMDDC), was tasked with turning around the persistent “underdevelopment” of the region. He wrote to President George Bush in 1989 on behalf of the commission: “Our goal is ambitious but simple—to make the Delta and its people a full partner in America’s future.

That means giving every person in the Delta the chance to be part of the American Dream.”31

The fact that the LMDDC failed in its efforts, and ultimately served to consolidate plantation bloc power, is explicable through the genealogy of the plantation. This genealogy suggests that the struggles of those living in the Mississippi Delta (as well as those entangled in strategies of plantation domination from St. James to Standing Rock), are not simply due to a failed inclusion in “America’s future,” but rather that the physical infrastructures and governing institutions that constituted “America’s future” have been and continue to be predatory.32 In the 19th century,

“America’s future” was built directly upon the land and wealth accumulation generated from the projects of chattel slavery and Indian removal. A genealogy of the spatial strategies of plantation

31 Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission, Body of the Nation (Memphis: LMDDC, 1989). Cited by Woods, Clyde. Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta. London and New York: Verso (1998). Pg. 1 32 I first heard the language of “predation” to describe hegemonic systems of the U.S from a class with Joy James in the fall of 2017. Harmon 21 domination shows that despite the end of chattel slavery and a supposed closure of the frontier, property regimes, infrastructures, and institutions continue to reproduce plantation relations into the present day. These relations have been maintained and naturalized through the production and supposed redemption of places of uninhabitability. The version of “America’s future” that

Bill Clinton invoked already contained too much of America’s past.

This plantation genealogy of levees, pipelines, property lines, reservations, buffer zones, fertilizers, and toxins circulate in the waters of the Mississippi and come together to create what the Army Corps calls, “the Valley of the Giant.”

Harmon 22

The Antebellum Plantation

Settlement

Dogs aren't racist but they can be trained to be as can the water as can the trees as can gravity as can anything marked by a pale hand & turned blood gold a bitter king's magic touch. ~Danez Smith, from the poem “dogs!”

In an account first published in 1770, Captain Philip Pittman documented what he saw of

European settlement along the Mississippi River. Along the length of river Norman and Persac would map a century later, Pittman noted, “The plantations and the well built houses on each side the river afford a very pleasing and agreeable prospect, which continues till we arrive at

New Orleans.”33 This “pleasing and agreeable” landscape had been made from a process already two centuries in the making. Pittman mentions the indigenous inhabitants of the land when describing the flow of commerce on the Mississippi in that area: “The merchandize necessary for the commerce to Natchitoches, Missoury [sic], and in general the upper posts on or near the

Missisippi [sic], is carried by Batteaus, which are rowed by eighteen or twenty men…they have a regular guard mounted: they use these precautions for fear of any attack from the Indians. The

Chicashaws [sic] formerly were very troublesome to them.”34 By the mid 18th century, the

Mississippi River was already a locus of contestation between settler commerce and indigenous land claims, as the “trouble” with the Chickasaw illustrates. The commercialization of the

Mississippi was already a force of dispossession, and control of the river was worth a mounted guard on every batteau moving up and down the river. The “trouble” has been placed in the past tense and generalized to lose the specificity of a particular conflict, a particular land grab or

33 Pittman, Captain Philip. The Present State of the European Settlements On the Mississippi: with a Geographical Description of that River illustrated by Plans and Draughts, London 1770, reprint The Arthur H. Clark Company 1906, pg. 40 34 Pittman, 36. Harmon 23 spatial claim—a grammatical move that contains within it the violence of European settlement in what is now called the Mississippi Alluvial Valley.

The Spanish and French settler projects of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries began with

De Soto and La Salle’s respective expeditions. Early European settlers found the land of

Louisiana to be an unpredictable wetland and ecologically unsuitable for recognizable forms of subsistence—a condition of uninhabitability. On a variety of occasions, “they were compelled to subsist mainly on maize procured from the Indians” because their own crops failed so miserably under frequent inundation.35 Nevertheless, European settlers considered indigenous subsistence and trade practices to be forms of “indolence.” As one French settler put it:

I am struck by the dominant preference of these tribes for indolence. They will go without things that we regard as absolutely necessary, merely because it would require a little effort to get them. If they have more corn than they actually need for food, this is due less to the quantity they sow than to the fertility of their soil, which, alone, is responsible.36

Indeed, European settlers considered shifting indigenous settlement in accordance with the river’s flood patterns and their reliance on fish and other hunting practices to be a form of moral depravity—the result of living in an uninhabitable place. Yet the unambiguous fact of indigenous existence contradicted the supposed uninhabitability of the geography, and was understood as the result of the agency of the soil itself as opposed to indigenous agency. But to harness the power of the soil, European settlers had to figure out a way to change the landscape and ecology.

European style agriculture, predicated on particular dry land staple crops and fixed settlement patterns, was antithetical to the Mississippi Alluvial Valley as it existed until settler engineering intervention. The river was the rogue agent that rendered the land uninhabitable for European

35 Gray, Lewis Cecil, and Esther Katherine Thompson. “History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860” (1933). Volume I, 62-63. 36 Gravier, Jacques. “Relation of Journal of the Voyage of Father Gravier, of the Society of Jesus, in 1700, from the Country of the Illinois to the Mouth of the Mississippi River,” Relations, 65: 149. Cited in Morris. Harmon 24 settlement so that conquest of the land was not only in opposition to indigenous belonging, but also to an out-of-control river.

In the late 18th and early 19th century, European settler expansion into the Mississippi

River Valley was anything but inevitable. Competing European imperial claims of France, Spain, and Britain contradicted and at times aligned with indigenous peoples’ territorial sovereignty.

Both indigenous people and the enslaved continually threatened the stability of the territorial and racial order.37 Due to the slave revolution in Haiti at the turn of the century and France’s subsequent loss of economic investment in the Mississippi Valley as a servicing station for its

Saint-Domingue colony, France sold “legal right” to the Louisiana territories west of the

Mississippi River to the United States in 1803.38 Following the 1815 Battle of New Orleans in which Andrew Jacksons’ army defeated an alliance of British, indigenous, and runaway slave forces, the United States was one step closer to asserting a national interiority that included the

Mississippi River Valley. Indeed, it was the specific fear that slave revolts and Indian raids would coincide with European invasion that allowed the United States to articulate a discourse and strategic position of white-supremacist national security predicated on the fortification of the coast line, racial repression of the black population, and settler violence.

While Spanish and French settlers certainly employed overt violence in obtaining indigenous land in the Mississippi Valley, it was not until the consolidation of US military power and the skyrocketing value of cotton and cane that Andrew Jackson mobilized the project of

“Indian Removal.” Deployment of the US military resulted in the “defeat of the Creek nation at

Horshoe Bend in 1814…the Choctaw land cessions at Doak’s Stand in 1820 and Dancing Rabbit

37 Johnson, 25 38 Johnson, 23 Harmon 25

Creek in 1830.”39 The consolidation of US power and territorial supremacy contributed to

Jackson’s belief in a geographic teleology of white expansionism, indigenous dispossession and genocide. The frontier, in Andrew Jackson’s words, was a notion of space that prefigured as inevitable the loss of indigenous land from “river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants… that this fate surely awaits them [Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek] if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt.”40

In his 1829 State of the Union address, Andrew Jackson explained, “I informed the

Indians…that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.”41 Such a proclamation captures Jackson’s strategy and colonial ideology that “inevitable” white settlement would destroy indigenous peoples within the

State, and that the only possible mode of indigenous survival was the concession of land, and emigration beyond the national interior to “Indian Territory:” a further relegation to the exterior.

In Jackson’s colonial imaginary, the Mississippi River marked the border across which Indians must cross, ceding the fertile lands of the alluvial valley to plantation production. This position led to the removal treaties of the Choctaw in 1831, and “the Creek, the Seminole, and the

Chickasaw in 1837. The Cherokee were forcibly removed along the ‘Trail of Tears’ in 1838.”42

The Houma and other indigenous people of Louisiana had already moved away from central

Louisiana and encroaching French settlement to the Mississippi floodplain and coastal wetlands

39 Johnson, 4 40 Jackson, Andrew. “State of the Union 1929.” 41 Jackson, Andrew. “First Annual Message,” December 8th 1829. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29471 42 Johnson, 30 Harmon 26 considered uninhabitable by settlers in the 18th and 19th century.43

In forced removals, indigenous peoples travelled over land and across rivers to reach

“Indian Territory.” Many travelled North on the Mississippi before heading West, perhaps crossing paths with the million enslaved Africans who were sold “down the river” between 1820 and 1860. The river loomed large as a marker of Indian dispossession, and one account from

Alexis de Tocqueville, who was present near Memphis in 1831 as a “band” of Choctaw crossed the Mississippi River heading west captures his view of the moment:

These savages had left their country, and were endeavoring to gain the right bank of the Mississippi, where they hoped to find an asylum which had been promised to them by the American Government. It was then the middle of winter, and the cold was unusually severe; the snow had frozen hard upon the ground, and the river was drifting huge masses of ice…I saw them embark to pass the mighty river, and never will that solemn spectacle fade from my remembrance. No cry, no sob was heard amongst the assembled crowd; all were silent. Their calamities were of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable.44

Tocqueville resists seeing the specificity of colonial violence under Jackson’s policies and plantation solidification and instead generalizes “their calamities” to be of “ancient date.” The processes of domination, resistance, and struggle become ancient, almost primordial; pain is subsumed under a noble rendering of “no cry, no sob.” The Choctaw become part of the pre- modern past even as Tocqueville watches them “embark to pass the mighty river.” Both the icy

Mississippi and the Choctaw band become frozen in a process ancient and ahistorical in

Tocqueville’s account, somehow already outside of the history of liberal democracy in the

United States. It is the icy river that primarily holds the violence of the colonial relation, for the right bank supposedly holds asylum provided by the US government. The river is the impediment, the chance of drowning and death. Tocqueville’s gaze makes the river embody

43 Dardar, Thomas Mayheart. “United Houma Nation History,” from http://www.unitedhoumanation.org/LiteratureRetrieve.aspx?ID=119557 accessed February 21st 2018 44 Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (1838) New York: The Colonial Press, 1900, 1:346 Harmon 27 relations of colonial violence.

Perhaps considering the same river crossing, Choctaw Chief, George Harkins counters:

Yet it is said that our present movements are our own voluntary act – such is not the case. We found ourselves like a benighted stranger, following false guides, until he was surrounded on every side, with fire and water. The fire was certain destruction, and a feeble hope was left him of escaping by water. A distant view of the opposite shore encourages the hope; to remain would be inevitable annihilation. Who would hesitate, or who would say that his plunging into the water was his own voluntary act?45

Harkins gestures at the particular history of colonial violence and deception by the United States that led he and the Choctaw to “plunge into the water.” He asks the question, “who would hesitate?” In this moment, to cross the river is to survive. Finally, he ends in the same way he began, by suggesting the incoherency of thinking about crossing the river as a “voluntary act.”

Harkins understands that the river is not merely a thing across which the Choctaw might or might not travel. The river has become part of the human relationship of power, its materiality is underwritten by the meaning that has been invested in it, the marker across which the Choctaw must cross to avoid death at the hands of the US military. Violence underwrote law, and violence flowed also beneath the surface of the water—the Choctaw crossing the Mississippi River was no more voluntary than the movement of slaves downstream into Choctaw land. Yet, Harkins’ account asserts his own agency and engages the complexity of action and meaning in the context of structural violence and genocide. He elevates indigenous agency and indicts the colonial state while Tocqueville seeks to disappear colonial relations, exclude indigenous agency and pain, and invest in the body of the river the violence of settler colonialism. While Tocqueville’s gaze reifies the scene, Harkins exposes the crossing as an immediate colonial relation, a human relation of force pushing him into the icy water.

The superficial neatness of plantations along the Mississippi River disappear the colonial

45 Harkins, George W. “To the American People” (December 1831). Anpa.ualr.edu/trailOfTears/letters/1831DecemberGeorgeWHarkinstotheAmericanPeople.htm. Harmon 28 relation into an orderly settler geography. Yet the indigenous people still living in Louisiana and

Mississippi, in addition to those now west of the Mississippi continue to unsettle the legitimacy of US democracy with articulations of meaning and claims to space that are antithetical to settler property lines: As Byrd writes, “democratic society is a lost cause in the United States” in that it is “always already conceived through the prior disavowed and misremembered colonization of indigenous lands that cannot be ended by further inclusion or more participation” in the settler state.46

In addition, the dispossession of indigenous peoples is not merely a past moment in capitalist or plantation development. Rather, dispossession is an ongoing structural feature of capitalist organization and plantation domination. In analyzing Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation, Glen Coulthard insists on the “enduring role that unconcealed, violent dispossession plays in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in the present.”47 He also asserts the need for a “contextual shift in analysis from the capital relation to the colonial relation” where “the inherent injustice of colonial rule is established on its own terms and in its own right.”48 Merely because the exploitation of native labor (although it certainly existed) was not an integral part of plantation capitalism does not mean that colonial dispossession of land does not fit within the theoretical frame of capitalist accumulation and the

Plantation. Coulthard’s call for a “contextual shift in analysis” to center “the history and experience of dispossession, not proletarianization,” illuminates not only 18th and 19th century

Indian Removal as structural features of capitalist development, but also subsequent indigenous dispossessions via flooding and energy infrastructure.49 I also want to suggest that Coulthard’s

46 Byrd, xxvi 47 Coulthard 59; for Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation, see Capital Volume I, chapters 26-32. 48 ibid 60 49 ibid 62 Harmon 29 analysis helps to contextualize the way colonial technologies of dispossession were later deployed by Planters against the African-American population whose labor became

“increasingly (although by no means entirely) superfluous to the political and economic development” of the plantation in the 1930’s.50 Without collapsing the histories of colonization and racialization, I am suggesting that from the perspective of power, dispossession (in both overt and concealed forms) continues to be a fundamental strategy of control deployed against various marginalized subjects depending on political-economic context. Coulthard’s analysis not only raises settler colonialism as an ongoing feature of the Planation economy, but also demonstrates that labor exploitation is not necessarily the central axis of plantation domination.51

Such dispossession took place in part through the production of uninhabitability—the creation of lands deemed unlivable only so that they might be redeemed by settler capital.

Ecology underscored the determination of a land as terra nullius: a place that could not possibly be inhabited because it bore none of the signs of European settlement. Following Voyles, the

Valley was made discursively “empty except for the Indian,” which thereby naturalized the conversion of “places that were previously deemed nonexistent (underwater, unlivable) into conquerable and profitable spatial categories.”52 For European settlers, the “swamp” of the

Mississippi Valley was a landscape in need of redemptive organization. That organization was predicated upon reducing the agency of nature to a series of comprehensible and therefore predictable and controllable laws. Insofar as the River might be reduced to laws of hydrology, then it was within the dominion of white management. The very act of engineering nature, of understanding human agency as something necessarily expanding at the expense of an

50 ibid 61; Coulthard is writing about native labor in Canada—I am suggesting resonances with transformations in plantation production. 51 Coulthard, 62 52 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 130. Harmon 30 increasingly objectified and inert nature became the sign of humanness. But a new, habitable and profitable geography, made possible by river engineering, slave labor, and indigenous dispossession, did not erase the category of the uninhabitable so much as it confined it to grids of management53: “Native reservations, plantations, and formal and informal segregations are just some of the ways the lands of no one were carved up to distinguish between and regulate the relations of indigenous, nonindigenous, African, and colonial communities, with some geographies still being cast as uninhabitable for particular groups.”54 The plantations that emerged from what had been a “swamp” became the material anchor to the legitimacy of white management. The redemption of a condemned geography validated a settler claim to space.

Property Lines and Hierarchical Landscapes

During the War of 1812, the federal government chartered the General Land Office with the task of mapping and allocating lands of displaced indigenous peoples to white settlers. Many of the plantations along the Mississippi in Louisiana preceded the US’s territorial control, and were the result of large tract French “concessions.”55 The Spanish government also granted large landholdings to its settlers, many of which endured into the 19th century. One of the plantations obtained after 1812 came to be known as the Uncle Sam Plantation, and was listed on Norman’s chart as the property of Samuel Fagot.56 Uncle Sam was a sugar plantation, like nearly all of the plantations between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The process of demarcating what land belonged to Fagot was one of cartographic, legal and ecological territorialization. Surveyors from the General Land Office moved across a landscape and inscribed rectangular grids that

53 ibid 54 McKitrrick, “Plantation Futures,” 6. 55 Gray, Volume 1, 391. 56 Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, Engineering Record, Landscapes Survey, Uncle Sam Plantation, Convent, St. James Parish, LA. Harmon 31 narrowed on their water border, to increase the amount of property with access to the river. The cartographic project was necessary to make land amenable to the legal regulation of property ownership and therefore the conversion of land to capital. Fagot’s plantation was highly profitable, and the layout of his plantation was fairly typical of other highly successful sugar plantations along the Mississippi (see fig. 3,4).

(fig. 3) 57

57 Library Congress HABS LA,47-CONV.V,1- (sheet 1 of 17) - Uncle Sam Plantation, Convent, St. James Parish, LA cited in Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. UNC Press Books, 1993. Pg. 191 Harmon 32

(fig. 4)58

The spatial organization of the Uncle Sam plantation mirrored the values of the social system itself. The large plantation house in front was a materialization of the labor power of slaves, who lived in cabins away from the main house. The overseer or foreman lived on the plantation, and was typically housed somewhere between the main house and the slave cabins, a spatial arrangement mirroring the class stratification among whites and the lower class status of the foreman.59 One traveler journeying down the Mississippi in 1818 commented at length upon the plantation landscape he saw:

58 ibid 59 Vlach, 136 Harmon 33

The plantations within these limits [Baton Rouge to New Orleans] are superb beyond description. Some of them resemble villages. The dwelling houses of the planters are not inferior to any in the United States, either with respect to size, architecture, or the manner in which they are furnished…The plantations are very extensive, and on some of them there are hundreds of negroes. The planters here derive immense profits from the cultivation of their estates. The yearly income from them is from 20,000 to 30,000 dollars…60

The view from the river was a tightly organized landscape of capitalist accumulation. While slaves were on full display as indications of the capital assets of the planter, they are described as part of the landscape of “cultivated estates.” Beyond the Big House and gardens are “vast buildings, occupied for sugar mills and cotton presses, and for the storage of the immense productions of the plantations. Near these, are from fifty to one hundred neat buildings, for the negroes, beyond them are spacious and elegant oblong fields, constituting one hundred acres, and under the highest state of cultivation.”61 The site of the plantation itself was spatial arrangement meant to reinforce hierarchy and organize brutally productive labor.

The geography of black movement on the plantation was rigidly circumscribed. The

Plantation was a space of discipline and surveillance that attempted to keep slaves in predictable locations and patterns of movement to maximize labor value. Slaves “out of place” either physically or in terms of demeanor were violently punished until they could be imagined as part of the landscape of the Plantation—visible yet objectified. According to Frederick Law

Olmstead’s description of the plantations on the Mississippi:

The soil was a perfect garden mould, well drained and guarded by levees against the floods; it was admirably tilled; I have seen but few Northern farms so well tilled; the labourers were, to large degree, tall, slender, sinewy, young men, who worked from dawn to dusk, not with spirit, but with steadiness and constancy.62

60 Evans, Estwick, Pedestrious Tour, Thwaits, Early Western Travels, VIII; 1904. 325 61 Evans, 330 62 Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. Based Upon Three Former Volumes of Journeys and Investigations... Vol. I Mason brothers, 1862. pg. 14). Harmon 34

The laboring black body became naturalized in plantation iconography and the white imaginary—simultaneously producing and justifying the conditions of chattel slavery.

In the idiom of plantation management and plantation account books, slaves were reduced through synecdoche to “hands.” A “prime hand” became an abstracted and somewhat standardized means to collapse the value of a slave into their ability to pick cotton and perform other manual labors: “When he prepared an 1841 slave list for planters Edward Frost and

Thomas Horry, overseer N. Thomas first listed the plantation’s forty full hands. Then he went on to name fifty-eight ‘hands that were not full,’ labeling their value in quarter hand increments”63

The conceptual relegation of enslaved people to “hands” was geographically articulated in the way Planters attempted to constrain slave circuits of mobility to coerced labor.

Although the claims to spatial ownership by white men that constituted the Plantation are in some ways so obvious as to recede into the landscape, it is exactly this quality that makes them worthy of analysis. In fact, it is important to read in the violence of the plantation landscape the instability of white men’s claim to ownership, the illegitimacy of a claim to mastery over racialized bodies and indigenous lands. The rectangular grids of the General Land Office that codified the immediate border of a plantation, the limitation of black mobility within prescribed routes of production, were so unstable as “natural” laws of property that they required the unmasked and overt violence of armed white men patrolling plantation borders each night:

In legal theory the slave had no right to freedom of movement nor control of his time… movement endangered general security, necessitating the development of the patrol system. Certain persons were commissioned to make the rounds of the countryside and to apprehend Negroes found wandering about or on plantations other than where they belonged…Patrols were authorized to disperse unlawful assemblages of Negroes and, pursuant to this function, to administer limited corporal punishment.64

63 Rosenthal, Caitlin, “Slavery’s Scientific Management: Masters and Managers,” in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. University of Pennsylvania Press 2016, pg. 76 64 Gray, 1:513 Harmon 35

Within the grid of racial control that constituted the borders of plantations along the Mississippi, the patrol served as the forceful manifestation of what were otherwise merely pieces of paper whose only legitimacy came from a State founded on stolen land and people.

The conversion of indigenous lands to commodified, abstracted, property units required the labor of surveyors to map, bankers to capitalize, and slaves to remake the physical landscape.

Colonial military conquest was solidified and naturalized through maps, property regimes, and a market economy that took as given the premise of white ownership over land and bodies.65

River Control

Rice farming served as a bridge between European agricultural practices and ecological reality along the Mississippi (rice has a high tolerance for wet soil and inundation). However,

French colonists were still deeply committed to the project of separating land from water and creating what in their minds constituted a stable landscape. Not insignificantly, the first African slaves brought to the South in 1718 were purchased for their familiarity with rice cultivation.66

The geographic and ecological overlaps between West Africa and Louisiana were made concrete through rice cultivation, as the institution of African slavery began to solidify in that region associated with both rice and river management: “The considerable attention to the cultivation of rice along the lower Mississippi was due to the facility with which the lands lying back from the river could be flooded by openings in the levees during the period of high water.”67

65 For crucial accounts and analyses of “alternative territorial systems” constructed and lived by slaves, maroons, and indigenous peoples, see: Vlach, 13, 167-168. Davis, Angela. "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves." The Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1/2 (1972): 81-100. Wynter, Sylvia. "Novel and history, plot and plantation." Savacou 5 (1971): 95-102. Camp, Stephanie M.H. “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861,” from New Studies in the History of American Slavery (University of Georgia Press 2006). 66 Carney, Judith Ann. Black Rice: the African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Harvard University Press, 2009. Pg. 146 67 Gray, Volume I, 66 Harmon 36

The financial success of rice allowed early plantation owners like Joseph Villars Debreuil to begin constructing levees along the river border of his property: as Governor Périer claimed in

1731, “’the lands can be drained and freed from water only by those who have negroes, since the work on levees and drainage is difficult and hard.’”68 For owners like Debreuil, the feedback loop was positive. Successful cultivation led to more capital, which could be realized in slaves who could improve the land with levees, drainage ditches and canals, which would in turn lead to more successful cultivation: “By 1744, Dubreuil was the wealthiest property owner in Louisiana, with several estates and over 500 slaves to do the work of freeing his land from water.”69

Despite the fact that settlers relied upon “indian corn” (often violently taken) and other food provided by Chitamacha, Choctaw, and Tunica hunting and gathering practices, belief in the supremacy of European style agriculture and habitation became the blueprint for the

Mississippi River plantations. The use of levees as a technology of river control by Dubreuil and others had a number of diverse impacts. As discussed above, levees both made possible (as agriculture became more profitable) and made “necessary” (as the underlying labor) the enslavement and importation of Africans. As a technology, levees also necessitated their own proliferation. Using slave labor to raise a river bank in front of one property had the hydrological effect of increasing flooding to those areas that did not have similarly raised embankments:

“Eventually, all landowners along the lower Mississippi River bought or hired laborers to build embankments. Beginning in 1727, [French] government edict began to force landowners to construct levees to uniform specifications.”70 Land that was once “naturally” dry, now flooded, because levees had cut off paths water had once taken. Levees along the lower Mississippi

68 Périer to Maurepas, December 10, 1731, MPAFD, 4:107. Cited in Morris. 69 Morris, Christopher. The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and its Peoples, from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina. Oxford University Press, 2012. pg. 58. Gray, Volume I, 65 70 Morris, 61 Harmon 37 quickly became a necessary feature of settlement. Indeed, levees became not only hydrological technologies, but also symbolic ones: “Levees became legal evidence of landownership, just as clearing and fencing did in other settings.”71 Levees also brought the State into the standardization of river infrastructure:

The town [New Orleans] is secured from the inundations of the river by a raised bank, generally called the Levée; and this extends from the Detour des Anglois, to the upper settlement of the Germans, which is a distance of more than fifty miles, and good coach- road all the way. The Levée before the town is repaired at the public expense, and each inhabitant keeps that part in repair which is opposite to his plantation.72

If one wished to settle along the incredibly rich soil of the Mississippi alluvial Valley (made so fertile due to the continual flooding of the river), then the construction of levees was no longer an option but a necessity, and an enslaved labor force to enact such material alterations was also considered indispensable.73

Enslaved black labor was the precondition for the existence of the cotton and sugar cane economy (insofar as slaves built the levees, dug the ditches, drained the swamps, and cleared the forests), even as the emergence of the cotton and cane economy began to be the justification for the existence and expansion of the regime of slavery. The control of the Mississippi River and the control of black labor were inextricable and mutually informing projects of the Plantation. As early as 1764, “Captain-Lieutenant Campbell, late of the thirty fourth regiment, undertook to clear the river [Iberville] and make it navigable; and by order of major Farmer (who at the time commanded in West Florida) hired upwards of fifty negroes for that purpose.”74 Even before US chattel slavery cohered, black labor was seen as indispensable for the project of river control.

71 Morris, 95 72 Pittman, 41 73 Gray, Volume I, 332 74 Pittman, 69 Harmon 38

In 1824, The General Survey Act and the Rivers and Harbors Act granted the Army

Corps of Engineers (which had solidified around building and maintaining military infrastructure during the War of 1812) jurisdiction over improvements to the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

Although the lower river levee projects were almost exclusively private operations throughout the antebellum period, the Army Corps began surveys and small projects on the lower river.75

From 1824, the language of the General Survey Act has set Army Corps priority toward projects

“of national importance, in a commercial or military point of view.”76

Just north of Ferguson, MO, the Missouri River flows into the Mississippi. For the next thousand miles, the waters of the Missouri and Mississippi flow together to the Gulf. For the

Army Corps of Engineers, control of the Mississippi and the commercial vitality of the nation were not possible without control of the Missouri. From 1855 until 1857, Lieutenant Warren of the Topographical Engineers, a division of the Army Corps, led an expedition in Nebraska and the Dakotas. Warren had started his career in the Mississippi Delta, and became a crucial part of the US’s military offensive against the Great Sioux Nation. In this 1858 report, Captain

Humphrey’s explained to the Secretary of War the main results of Warren’s expedition:

The principal objects of the expedition were to ascertain the best route by which to continue to the South Pass the military road now constructing from the Mississippi River to Sioux City, on the Missouri… and to make such reconnaissance of the Black Hills, about the sources of the Big Cheyenne, as circumstances would permit, to determine their character, especially with reference to the future military operations that may be carried on in this Territory. In accomplishing these objects, the expedition would obtain information of the character and resources of the country, its adaptability to settlement and cultivation, and would develop its geography and geology along the routes pursued, nearly all of which were previously unexplored by white men (my emphasis).77

75 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “A Brief History: Improving Transportation.” http://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Brief-History-of-the-Corps/Improving-Transportation/ Accessed January 23rd 2018. 76 Ibid. 77 United States Army Corps of Engineers. Engineer Historical Studies: Explorer on the Northern Plains: Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren's Preliminary Report of Explorations in Nebraska and Dakota, in the Years 1855 · '56 ·'57. Pg. 36 Harmon 39

Humphrey’s was describing the military implications of Warren’s topological work the same year that Norman’s chart was published. The Army Corps of Engineers and their mission to organize space in accordance with US military ambition and capitalist wealth accumulation supported both projects. Already by 1858, engineering control of the Mississippi and the military dispossession of the Standing Rock Sioux were entangled in the projects of the Army Corps of

Engineers—connecting genocidal violence in Sioux territory to profits on the sugar plantations of Louisiana.

The “agreeable” landscape of plantation opulence and profit noted by Evans and Pittman in their travels along this stretch of the Mississippi seems to suggest the plantation as spontaneously emergent from the rich alluvial soils. The narrative of uninhabitability had been transformed in such a short time to a narrative of the land and river as “naturally” well suited to the plantation, justifying its congealed racial and settler violence as an inevitable outgrowth of the landscape itself. In fact, the pre-colonial landscape was antithetical to the Plantation—the river kept flooding, the land was too wet, the river was barely navigable, the Indians were dangerous, etc. It was only through the violences of settler colonialism and slavery that the materiality of the Valley could be remade. And of course, in reciprocal fashion, it was only through the altered landscape (the material and symbolic redemption of a condemned geography) that the project of the settler plantation could be realized and naturalized behind the levee.

Flows of Capital

In contrast to the structured immobility of the enslaved, the mobility of capital and commodities were crucial to the plantations along the lower Mississippi. While discourses glorifying US capitalism have a stake in narrating Plantation wealth creation as geographically Harmon 40 limited to the Southern United States where some racist whites profited from the brutal and feudalistic regime of slavery, such a notion has no basis in fact.78 As Sven Beckert and Seth

Rockman put it in their introduction to an anthology exploring the inextricability of slavery and capitalism: “The perception of slavery as an inefficient way of organizing labor and a hindrance to economic development stretches back to the eighteenth century and still appears commonsensical in the wake of the industrializing North’s victory over the slaveholding South in the Civil War.”79 Instead of a self-contained, backward, agricultural aristocracy, plantations were fully integrated into industrial and finance capitalism. David Harvey writes:

The massive exploitation of a rural peasantry by a landlord class is…entirely consistent with industrial capitalism when it provides cheap food for the urban workers and a cheap supply of raw materials for industry. A powerful alliance can be created between the landed interest and an industrial bourgeoisie on this basis.80

Harvey is suggesting a symbiosis within a capitalist economy of industrial production and exploited agricultural labor in which owners of industrial operations, banks, and plantations all profit based upon flows of capital and commodities including land, slaves, cotton, and credit.

Plantation production was capitalized through networks of credit and financial institutions. The incredible capital outlays required to produce cotton and cane on a profitable scale meant that even wealthy Plantation owners had most of their wealth “tied up in land and slaves.”81 Because of the temporal dimensions of cotton production, only for a brief period of time after they sold the crop up the river would Plantation owners realize the surplus value they extracted from slaves as liquid capital. Accordingly, a dynamic infrastructure of credit and finance linked to slave (grown) commodities grew up with Plantation production. Plantations

78 Williams, Eric. Slavery and Capitalism. University of North Carolina 1944; Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014 79 Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism pg. 3 80 Harvey, David, The Limits to Capital, University of Chicago Press 1982, pg. 345 81 Johnson 12 Harmon 41 were capitalized through convoluted circuits of money mobility that tied banks in various locations to the value of slaves in Louisiana and also to the very ideology of white supremacy:

“Money, or what passed for money, was the only cheap thing to be had.”82 According to Lewis

Cecil Gray’s 1930’s study of southern agriculture, in the 1830’s, a “mania developed for buying land and slaves, fostered by the employment of State credit in the promotion of banks.”83 Some of these banks included the First and Second Banks of the United States in Philadelphia, The

Bank of Kentucky, City Bank, the Commercial Bank, the Union Bank, the Bank of Louisiana, and the Exchange and Banking Company of New Orleans.84

Capitalist financial markets made the plantation real and possible. Financial instrumentation could abstract the violence of slavery out of the consciousness of investors such that market logics could become morally neutral assessments of what might or might not make money—cotton flecked in blood could be represented by numbers on a page.

Flows of Commodities

Hardly relegated to the South, Mississippi River plantations were a global formation from their inception. Cotton and cane produced by slave labor power (itself imported from West

Africa) was sold and transported to the cities of the North and back across the Atlantic to Britain to supply the raw material of European industrialism:

For most of the period before the Civil War, the United States was the source of close to 80 percent of the cotton imported by British manufacturers. The fortunes of cotton planters in Louisiana and cotton brokers in Liverpool, of the plantations of the Mississippi Valley and the textile mills of Manchester, were tied together through the

82 Baldwin, Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi 81-84. Gray 2:899 83 Gray, 2:899 84 Murphy, Sharron A. “Banking on slavery in the antebellum South.” Working paper presented to the Yale University Economic History Workshop May 1, 2017. 10 Harmon 42

cotton trade—the largest single sector of the global economy in the first half of the nineteenth century.85

The global scale of the Plantation economy was not simply an outward growth of a once self- contained economy, but rather the spatial configuration that made the Plantation possible to begin with. Few would-be plantation owners would have had access to the capital necessary to control land and bodies in the way they did, had banks not understood the money to be made from a global market in slave (grown) commodities. The Plantation came to be precisely because of the geographic connections between New York and Liverpool, between Benin and Baton

Rouge.86 The antebellum Plantation was a global geography organizing flows of value under a capitalist economy in addition to specific sites of violence.

While cotton dominated the Mississippi River plantations north of Baton Rouge, the stretch south to New Orleans was a dense zone of highly profitable sugar cane production.

Owing to the advances and adoption of steam technology in the processing of sugar, and the introduction of new sugar varieties such as ribbon cane, sugar plantations solidified along the lower Mississippi in the early 19th century.87 Expressing his concern over the federal government’s potential lowering of the protective tariff on Louisiana sugar cane, Louisiana

Senator Josiah Stoddard Johnston articulated the stakes of the sugar crop:

The value of lands and slaves, which constitute a sugar establishment, is predicated upon the value of sugar; and that depends on the rate of duty established by the laws. A reduction of duty which will change the price of sugar, will at the same time reduce the value of the labor employed in making it; and by that means the value of lands and slaves, and the standard of value of every thing else depending on it.88

Johnston’s 1831 letter to the Secretary of the Treasury is remarkable for the ways in which it so

85 Johnson, 10 86 “Plantation economy Thesis” Beckford, George L. Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World. University of West Indies Press, 1999. 87 Gray, 2:740 88 Johnston, Josiah Stoddard, 1784-1833. Letter of Mr. Johnston, of Louisiana, to the Secretary of the Treasury: In Reply to His Circular of the 1st July, 1830, Relative to the Culture of the Sugar Cane. Washington: Printed by Gales & Seaton, 1831. pg. 4 Harmon 43 clearly articulates the delicate balance upon which sugar plantations rested. A drop in the tariff protecting Louisiana’s sugar from production in the “West Indies,” would cause a drop in the value of labor power, and a subsequent drop in the value of both land and slaves—the two assets that made up the vast majority of plantation wealth. He goes on to argue that capital and slave labor have been invested in sugar production only because of the existing tariff. Should the sugar tariff be removed, capital and labor will shift and saturate cotton production, leading to an oversupply and a depression of prices and values:

I cannot believe that the Southern States, with a correct view of this great concern, will consent to destroy this national object; one essential to our independence and our comfort; to destroy the whole value of slave property; to ruin the People of Louisiana, now in a course of experiment; to strike out from the protection of Government the only great object in which the South can feel any interest.89

Johnston’s argument rests on his intimate understanding of the capitalist market of the

Louisiana’s sugar plantations, and his contention that the continued profit in Louisiana is inextricably connected to profit elsewhere. The expansion of cane keeps the price of slaves high through the internal trade, keeps northern factories happy with demands for clothing, and supports the Ohio valley with purchases of

provisions and animals… Of the 100,000 hhds. of sugar, made in Louisiana, 50,000 hhds. are transported up the Mississippi in steamboats, for the supply of the Western States, who obtain it in exchange for their productions. Here, then, there is an internal trade of five millions, created in the Western States. The remainder of the sugar is transported coastwise by our vessels, to the North, to restore the balance of trade with that quarter, as well as with foreign nations.90

Johnston makes clear the ways in which so many aspects of the United States economy in the early 19th century relied on the plantations along the Mississippi River, the way in which Planter wealth acquisition was connected to foreign trade, westward expansion, and industrial

89 Johnston, 8 90 Johnston, 9 (hhds. Stands for “hogsheads,” which was a unit of measure for volume: 1 gallon equals about 60 hhds.) Harmon 44 development:

In the separation of employments, that takes place in the progress of society, there arises a complicated system of connection and dependence, in which all the parts unite, to produce a result, in which the whole power combined depends on the mutually connected members. It is clear that all therefore as to every practical effect—that labor wheresoever and in whatever form it contributes to the production of sugar, is a necessary part of the combined operation, and equally serves to increase the amount and value of the article, and to add to the general mass of wealth.91

Those self contained sugar plantations on Norman’s chart are in fact reliant on flows of capital and commodities moving up and down the river—the plantation was a particular node organizing racial and colonial violence in a larger system of wealth acquisition.

The Plantation was, of course, structured around a relation of labor. One cannot consider the antebellum plantation without the specific regime of chattel slavery. But I want to suggest that contextualizing labor regimes of the Mississippi River plantations within a series of spatial strategies— indigenous dispossession, property grids, global capital and commodity flows, black immobility, and river engineering—provides a means to understand what the plantation was and continues to be. Emancipation was neither the first nor the last crisis for the Plantation. The

Panic of 1837 interrupted credit flows, the flood of 1851 broke the barrier between land and water, and the constant resistance of enslaved and indigenous people—through their own proclamations of emancipation, escape and revolt—shook the foundation of the plantation.

Indeed, instead of a stable and spatially secure formation before the Civil War and an institution in shambles after, the Plantation was in a constant process of articulating and stabilizing itself both before and after emancipation.

91 Johnston, 10 Harmon 45

Post Bellum Plantation

Most historians and economists treating the plantations have been pre-occupied with the institution of slavery; what they apparently have not recognized, or have only partly glimpsed, is that the plantation landholdings remained intact through the Civil War and Reconstruction and, indeed, on down to the present. ~Merle Prunty.“The Renaissance of the Southern Plantation,” 1955

Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality. ~Malcolm X. “Message to the Grassroots,” 1963

In attempting to re-assert control over black labor power, the planter class developed a variety of technologies to recreate conditions of involuntary servitude—through the exploitative relationship of sharecropping, and through the legal mechanism of criminality.92 From Angola

Prison on the banks of the Mississippi to the infamous Parchman Farm in the Mississippi Delta, the land adjacent to the Mississippi was used to re-inscribe a geography of black captivity and forced labor. The use of legal and extralegal violence sought to enforce a white supremacist geography that continued to allow for the export of commodities and the profit of white

Plantation owners. A visually recognizable Plantation persisted into the 20th century on the backs of prison laborers and sharecroppers: “In 1910 fully nine-tenths of all southern blacks who made their living from the soil worked as tenants, sharecroppers, or contract laborers. Most barely eked out enough in cotton to pay for rent, food, and supplies. They did not own their own equipment, nor could they market their crop independent of the landlord.”93 Circuits of mobility for freed

African-Americans were typically limited within the plantations of South, moving from one to another every December. Planters had a variety of mechanisms, legally codified or otherwise, to

92 It’s also worth noting that sugar planters attempted to use imported Chinese labor after emancipation as an alternative racialized labor supply. See: Jung, Moon-Ho. Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. JHU Press, 2006. 93 Jones, Jacqueline, and American Council of Learned Societies. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow : Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. 1st Vintage Books ed. ACLS Humanities E-Book. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Pg. 81 Harmon 46 limit the mobility of sharecroppers both on and between plantations: "Prohibitions against movement on and off the plantation were routine."94

Land Inheritance and Capital Flow

According to Allison Davis’ 1930’s study of Natchez, Mississippi (the top of Norman’s map), “The possession or nonpossession of land represents the margin between at least the minimum of security and stability and absolute insecurity.”95 What Davis’ research team found was a variety of legal and extra-legal mechanisms through which ownership over land and therefore access to capital and security remained largely unchanged after emancipation. Other than a brief period of time while the federal government enforced reconstruction era land redistribution, African-Americans and poor whites had almost no opportunity to alter their condition of laboring for the surplus value of white landowners. Looking at the continuity of the large landowning class in and around Natchez, the researchers found that “approximately 87 per cent of the largest landholders in 1913 are still in Old County and that 76 per cent of them are still among the largest landholders and have increased their holdings.” Of the nineteen large landholders who had obtained their land since 1913, and did not inherit their land from a direct line to the antebellum plantation, “eight of the 19 were absentee owners. These new landlords are chiefly owners of extremely large holdings or are finance companies.”96

Plantations remained highly dependent on finance capital after the civil war. After the fall of chattel slavery, planters had to convince investors that they could still produce highly profitable commodities—a claim based on their continuing ability to control land and labor. In

1919, planters circulated a document called The Call of the Alluvial Empire, which made the

94 Jones, 55. 95 Davis et al, 276. 96 Davis, et al, 280. Harmon 47 case for investment in river plantations.97 The document details “a soil of unrivalled richness and a climate approaching the agricultural ideal,” as well as levees which “have been built higher and stronger until now the world’s most eminent engineers believe they will prove an impregnable barrier against a greater flood than ever has swept down the Father of Waters. The levees have held their own with ease since 1913.”98 Such advertisement helped capture new capital from “the Union Planters Bank, Bank of Commerce and Trust Company, Guarantee Bank and Trust Company, several Mississippi and Arkansas banks, and the National City Bank of New

York.”99

Banks capitalized new settlement along the Mississippi to the degree that planters could re-create the productive conditions of the antebellum plantation, while simultaneously appealing to discourse of modernization. In a vision described by the planter pamphlet:

With bewildering speed, farms and plantations of incomparable productiveness have been developed; unsightly villages have grown into progressive towns with splendid homes, fine stores, strong banks, good schools and churches, paved streets, electric lights and sewer systems; and millions of dollars have been provided for hard-surfaced highways to connect the communities of the Alluvial Empire.100

Those who purchased land in this era, such as the Delta and Pine Land Company, a group formed through British textile capital, did so on the basis of the supposed legitimacy of purchasing stolen land, and their ability to reproduce conditions of nearly involuntary servitude.

The Delta and Pine Land Company, just north of Greenville, MS, controlled nearly 40,000 acres and over a thousand sharecroppers.101

However, due to the increasing difficulty of controlling African-American workers (due

97 Southern Alluvial Land Association; The West Side Delta: containing authentic information about the super-soil region of Eastern Arkansas and Easter Louisiana, two important part of the Alluvial Empire; Copyright 1920 98 ibid. 7 99 Woods, 90. 100 Southern Alluvial Land Association: pg. 7. 101 Mills, Jacqueline Warren, and W. Theodore Mealor. "DELTAPINE REVISITED: THE METAMORPHOSIS OF A PLANTATION." Southeastern Geographer 43, no. 2 (2003): 181-96. Monsanto now owns the Delta and Pine Land Company. Harmon 48 to migration and sharecropper organizing) as well as flooding, and the ecological devastation of soils, “’many farmers who expanded acreage and secured loans during World War I could not pay off their loans; their creditors foreclosed… [it was estimated] that life insurance companies and banks owned 30 percent of all southern cotton land in 1934.”102 Banks found themselves increasingly in control of plantations failing both socially and ecologically.

In Natchez, “most of the colored tenants are descendants of former slaves in the same county and that many of them still rent from the same white family which owned their slave- ancestors.”103 Crucial to understanding the entire history of the plantation, and future developments along this stretch of the Mississippi, is the relationship between the ability to marshal violent force, the law, and mobility. Contracts associated with the tenant farming system demonstrated the power structure implicit in the legal system: “The subordination of the lower caste by the operation of the courts…renders such written contracts worthless, since no colored tenant would sue a white landlord for any failure to abide by the rental contract.”104 One “colored man” interviewed by the researchers discussed the ways in which white control over land, the courts, and extra-legal violence made the credit relations particularly predatory. Plantation owners routinely lent advances to their tenants (which they were made to believe were payments for their work), charging them exorbitant interest: “’There’s nothing he can do. Even if he can read and write, as most of them can’t, he knows he dare not dispute the planter or he’ll get shot or beaten. He knows it’s out of the question to go to court against him. And no other landlord will rent to him if this planter doesn’t want him to leave.’”105 These strategies allowed planters to limit African-American movement.

102 Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880. University of Illinois Press, 1986. Pg. 168-69. 103 Davis, et al, 297 104 Davis, et al, 291 105 Davis, et al, 352 (my emphasis) Harmon 49

In Natchez, one African-American man, forced to work under a system of debt-peonage on the land of a wealthy white planter perfectly articulated the foundation of the entire system of land ownership and power hierarchy from the 18th to the 20th century:

You go out heah an’ you see wheah one man own all de lan’ fuh seven miles, all ‘long de road. Dat’s all his…How’d dat-----git all dat lan’? He ain’ done nuthin’ tuh git it…nevuh done a lick of work on it…Here’s all these-----ol’ worthless-----wid all dis lan’. How’d dey git it? Dey gran’fathuhs come heah an’ stole it from de Indjuns, an’ den dey stole nigguhs to clean an’ wuk it fuh dem. All right!106

The legally codified system of inheritance ensured that relations of overt anti-indigenous and anti-black violence that built the antebellum plantation were carried on beyond emancipation, essentially enshrining the spatial relations of domination created by chattel slavery and Indian removal into the 20th century.

River Control and The Army Corps of Engineers

(fig. 5: from official government history, A History of the Memphis District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 1876-

1981; note the use of the term “volunteer convict labor.”)107

106 Davis, et al, 278 107 Clay, Floyd M. A Century on the Mississippi: A History of the Memphis District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 1876-1981. US Army Corps of Engineers, June 1986. Pg. 74 Harmon 50

The Valley of the Giant that the Army Corps sought to construct and maintain was the

“greatest river valley in the world,” a place where “agriculture will flourish and the people of the valley will prosper.”108 According to Delta planter F.D. Beneke, attempting to draw capital to the region and increase land values:

In all the rich history of American achievement, there is nothing more brilliant, more heroic than the conquest of the Mississippi River, whose turbulent waters have been definitely conquered after a long, relentless struggle, and its floods forever hemmed in by a parallel chain of titanic levees skirting each side of the huge channel from Missouri and Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico. Behind these giant, earthen walls from the river itself to the hills that fringe the Mississippi Valley lies America's promising Alluvial Empire, whose 27,165,000 acres of super-soil, available at last for agriculture, are comparable in the wealth of lime, nitrogen, phosphorus and humus only with the far-famed Delta of the Nile… The road to wealth and independence for the young man leads to the Alluvial Empire. In many localities it still is a pioneer country. But everywhere it is the premier land of opportunity for the man who KNOWS HOW TO FARM.109

The Valley when properly organized seems to be perfectly and naturally suited to plantation production. This naturalized geography features super soils, the non-existence of African-

American or indigenous agency, a river “forever hemmed in” by levees (this was written seven years before the Great Flood of 1927), and the elevated agency of white men who need only know how to farm in order to walk “the road to wealth and independence.” The Army Corps’ celebrated valley was a construction, a product of human relations not merely natural soils, which for all its “show and tinsel” was “built upon a groan.”110

In Natchez, as in other cities and towns along the Mississippi, African-Americans who could escape the system of sharecropping often “depended largely upon the work furnished by the federal and local governments in the dredging of the river, the construction of new levees, and the building of roads.”111 The constant project that was securing the banks of the lower

108 Valley of the Giant, 25:19 109 Southern Alluvial Land Association, pg. 5, 7 110 Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903 111 Davis, et al, 261 Harmon 51

Mississippi went unaccounted for during the Civil War, as levees went into disrepair: “by war’s end, flooding was the single greatest obstacle to land reclamation and agricultural restoration.”112

Even before the 1879 creation of the Mississippi River Commission, essentially federalizing the control of the Mississippi River, the Union Army saw the “necessity” of maintaining the plantation riverscape. In 1863, just five years after Norman’s chart captured a perfectly ordered plantation landscape, the Mississippi had flooded, the levees were in total disrepair, and plantation production had stalled. The Union Army became the force responsible for helping to re-organize the landscape, which meant compelling former slaves to return to levee construction and rebuilding, often with threat of force.113 The economy of the United States required the continued viability of Southern agriculture, and so the Union Army not only found itself securing land for African-Americans, but also as a matter of “military necessity,” forced freedmen and women to restore the levees in St. John the Baptist Parish to “defray the expenses of the new

Levee.”114 The securing of property and commodity flow fundamentally took precedence over black freedom even in the time of Reconstruction, as the federal government articulated a continued interest in the Plantation economy through their technical discourses of hydrology and military necessity.

Following Reconstruction, nearly all land had been returned to the control of whites: “By the mid-1870’s no more than 4 to 8 percent of all freed families in the South owned their own farms.”115 In the post-slavery era, under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers and the

Mississippi River Commission, levees were once again a material articulation of the racialized

112 Morris, 134 113 Wiley, B. I. "Vicissitudes of Early Reconstruction Farming in the Lower Mississippi Valley." The Journal of Southern History 3, no. 4 (1937): 441-52. 114 Berlin, Ira, Thavolia Glymph, Steven Miller, Joseph Reidy, Leslie Rowland, and Julie Saville, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, Ser. 1, Vol. 3, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 561-69. 115 Jones, 63. Harmon 52 geography of the plantation, in which black men were forced by violence, criminalization, and debt to build a physical environment that facilitated their own disempowerment through the persistent plantation: “As yet uncalculated is the large number of Irish American and African

American workers who lost their lives building and maintaining what was one of the world’s largest public works eventually stretching from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans” in the late 19th century.116 Levee construction was a brutal and highly racialized business, as it had been since the French colonial era: in addition to the normal labor, many African-Americans “lost their lives when they were forced to protect levees during the numerous floods.”117 In many places along the river, African-Americans had to choose between laboring in the white man’s field and constructing the barrier that secured the white man’s profit from inundation: “Some two hundred colored men from Old City [Natchez] were employed in levee gangs at the height of the season in 1934…The subordination of this group of workers was still extreme, although the intervention of the federal government had reduced the power of contractors to hold workers in debt-peonage.

Contractors still maintain a well-developed system of economic controls of levee workers.”118

Levee workers were injured and killed by white foreman for requesting compensation for their work even as late as the 1930’s when post-civil war repairs had been made.119 The reclamation of land from water was also a process of whites reclaiming land from blacks.

Under the 1917 Flood control act, river engineering was administered by the Secretary of

War and designed “for controlling the floods of the Mississippi River and continuing its improvement from the Head of the Passes to the mouth of the Ohio River.” In addition, the act stipulated that “the Secretary of War is hereby empowered, authorized, and directed to carry on

116 Woods, 76 117 Woods, 78 118 Davis, et al, 439 119 Davis, et al, 440 Harmon 53 continuously, by hired labor or otherwise, the plans of the Mississippi River Commission heretofore or herafter adopted (my emphasis).”120 The Mississippi River Commission (started in

1879) was established to stop flooding and protect the material interests of planters and commerce through navigation improvements to the river. The flood control act essentially provided the US military with the ability to use whatever labor they could marshal, “hired or otherwise,” to build infrastructure designed to benefit plantation owners. River engineering was part of post-emancipation racial engineering, an attempt to re-articulate a racialized economy and geography that kept elite whites on top.

Flood of 1927

The increased channelization of the river for navigation, and the leveeing of the banks to stop seasonal inundation, created a river more prone to catastrophic flooding. In 1927, the lower

Mississippi River carried “in excess of three million cubic feet of water per second,” up from a

500,000 average, and broke through the levees, flooding almost 30,000 square miles in up to 30ft of water. Thousands were killed and almost a million people were displaced. On the levee at

Greenville, MS (150 miles north of Natchez), river and racial control collided in a shockingly tangible way.121

The language of military confrontation and conquest saturates the engineering work of the Army Corps on the Mississippi (and elsewhere). According to Maj. W. H. Holcombe at the

MRC in New Orleans in 1927, “A high-water fight on the Mississippi River is about the nearest thing to war imaginable, and morale must be kept up just as in military operations.”122 For Maj.

Halcombe, this meant forcing men, many of whom were African-American prisoners, to

120 United States Congress. Flood Control Act (1917), 64th Cong. Sess. II, Ch. 144 121 Barry, John M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America. Simon and Schuster, 2007. 193 122 Johnson, Leland R. Situation Desperate: U.S. Army Engineer Disaster Relief Operations, Origins to 1950. Office of History, US Army Corps, Virginia 2011. pg. 148. Harmon 54 continue sandbagging the levee despite its hopelessness. As the waters rose, the National Guard helped coordinate the levee fortification in Greenville. In the words of commanding officer

Lieutenant E.C Sanders, “the negroes ran to the break” in the levee in order to reinforce the structure, “but as they arrived they soon became demoralized and ran away. It then became necessary for the civilian foreman and my detachment to force the negroes to the break at the point of guns.”123 On the levee at Greenville, with water pouring in, black bodies were literally forced at the point of the gun to become the levee. The black body was forced to act as the sandbag, to shore up the hole in the “master plan” of flood protection.

In the aftermath of the flood, with millions of acres of cotton underwater, and a quarter million African-Americans in refugee camps, the cotton plantation was in flux. Fear of African-

American flood victims leaving the South for good was central to planter’s fears. The Delta planter, Leroy Percy explained “’If we depopulate the Delta of its labor we should be doing it a grave disservice.’”124 Percy helped to manage the Red Cross Camps where nearly 500,000

African Americans sought relief, some were forced into these encampments “at gunpoint by the

Mississippi National Guard.”125 Red Cross Relief Camps became labor camps, as African-

Americans were put to work as the floodwaters subsided. A member of the Colored Advisory

Commission sent to investigate the treatment of African-Americans in the camps, poet Langston

Hughes described the conditions he saw: “Some were surrounded by National Guardsmen.

Negroes were not allowed outside the gates without the permission of their landlords who were waiting for the water to subside so they could force these refugees back into semi-slavery.”126

Despite these attempts at controlling labor and draining the cotton fields, cotton production never

123 Barry, 200 124 Woods, 119. 125 Ibid 118. 126 Hughes, Langston, “Justice,” New Masses, 7 (August 1931), 15. Harmon 55 recovered, declining in acreage and profit steadily after 1929: “At the beginning of the season of

1931-32, the price of cotton reached its lowest point since 1898, with no proportionate decline in the farmer’s costs of production.”127

As conveyed by a 1947 Army Corps of Engineers film: “sometimes The Giant [the

Mississippi River] gets out of control. Sometimes the rich valley lies helpless against great floods that leave terror and destruction in their wake.”128 For the Army Corps of Engineers, it was necessary to produce a version of the Mississippi River as enemy combatant. Not only would this make their hydrological task consistent with their military training, but also it made possible the dissolution of all kinds of violence under notions of collateral damage. During and after the Flood of 1927, the State denied human agency in the event. The flood was portrayed as a result of the agency of the Mississippi, the “Giant” who came down “from a thousand hillsides” and left “terror and destruction” in its wake. All of the socially contingent infrastructure, the levees that supported the plantation economy, the segregation and immobilization of African-Americans, the uneven access to rescue and relief was all subsumed under the rogue agency of the River.

The catastrophic flooding was in part a result of the leveeing and straightening of the river, which had increased the volume and velocity of water. The Corps, who chose to blow up a levee south of New Orleans and flood a poor community to save the more affluent city, explicitly planned the specifics of the terror. The death and violence of the flood could be blamed on an environment that was in need of further engineering expertise, as opposed to the existing power structures and associated infrastructures that caused the particular experience of death and dispossession. The River was made to symbolically contain the violence of white supremacy. As

127 Davis, et al, 257 128 US Army Corps of Engineers; Valley of the Giant, 1947. 6:10 Harmon 56 long as the discourse exists around the “danger of the river,” as opposed to the violence of the plantation regime, then the Army Corps of Engineers will always be the most “qualified experts” to command, control and subdue the Giant—to reinstate a normal geography.

Indeed, in the 1986 history of the Army Corps Memphis District, Colonel Dale F. Means asserts that “apart from its annual flood threat, no river has played a greater part in the development and expansion of a nation than the Mississippi…today, the lower Mississippi River is a giant in shackles and the nation’s principal waterway.”129 The Army Corps consistently mythologizes itself in a battle with a Giant, a force of brute strength who can be restrained only with the superior rationality of the Engineer. The Giant is deployed by the Army Corps in strategic moments to justify the anti-black and anti-indigenous violence of its normal operations.

Flood discourse has been limited to expert knowledges of hydrology, instead of challenges to the very notion that a military organization with a vested interest in reproducing the power structures of the plantation should have jurisdiction over the largest “public” waterway and source of fresh water in the United States. As the film puts it, “and so the master plan goes forward,”130 justifying and normalizing the spatial control of an entire river system (and its associated political-economy) by a profoundly undemocratic and militaristic institution.

Agricultural Wastelanding and the Plantation in Crisis

After the Great Flood of 1927, the Army Corps was commissioned to develop a “master plan” under the 1928 Flood Control Act, and in addition to doubling down on the levee system, it created a system of spillways and cutoffs designed to ensure large-scale flooding events could never occur again. Soil along the Mississippi, once highly fertile due to frequent flooding of the

129 Clay, Floyd M. A Century on the Mississippi: A History of the Memphis District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 1876-1981. US Army Corps of Engineers June 1986. Vii. 130 The Valley of the Giant: 24:58. Harmon 57 river, became exhausted due to annual mono cropping of nitrogen depleting cash crops like cotton. With the constant turning of the soil, without any perennial root systems to hold the soil in place, the rich top soil along the Mississippi was more prone to erosion and runoff. In 1938, the US Department of Agriculture released a short film entitled The River. The River is remarkable for a number of reasons: its erasure of indigenous peoples in its history of the valley, its conflation of the inexorable flow of water with the flow of commerce, and the hero’s role of the US government. However, it is the two scenes beginning in the film’s 21st minute that explain the most about the structure of the Plantation and its various crises in the 1930’s. The first of these scenes focuses on the loss of topsoil in the Mississippi Valley:

Spring and Fall, the water comes down, and for years the old River has taken a toll from the valley more serious than ever she does in flood time. Year in, year out, the water comes down. Down from a thousand hillsides, washing the top off the valley. For fifty years we dug for cotton and moved west when the land gave out. For fifty years we plowed for corn and moved on when the land gave out. We planted and plowed with no regard for the future. And four hundred million tons of topsoil, four hundred million tons of our most valuable natural resource have been washed into the Gulf of Mexico every year.131

In the narration, the “old River” is the principal agent in the loss of topsoil, the force that is

“washing the top off the valley.” Of course, it was the River that created the rich soils to begin with, and white engineering and intensive monocropping that created a new antagonistic relationship between soil and water. It is somewhat unclear who the narrator includes in the “we” who “planted and plowed with no regard for the future” and moved “west when the land gave out.” The “we” does not seem to actually include the enslaved black laborers that did the vast majority of the planting and plowing—they are pushed into the landscape and become part of a history of the land that “gave out.” The 1930’s, as this film captures, were a time of genuine anxiety on the part of the USDA, where the ecological and economic viability of agriculture on

131 USDA, The River, 21:15 Harmon 58 the Great Plains and the Mississippi River Valley was in doubt. The Dust Bowl and Mississippi runoff registered a legitimate alarm expressed by this film that topsoil needed to be taken seriously and that colonial western movement when the soil failed was no longer an option.

From the concern with topsoil loss, the film pivots immediately to an even deeper anxiety with white futurity, showing the deep connections between the ecology of commodity production and white supremacy within the plantation. While the cheery music of American commerce had previously scored shots of black farmers working in cotton fields, in this scene, the music turns to a dark lament as white tenant farmers appear on screen, working the cotton fields:

And poor land makes people. Poor people make poor land. For a quarter of a century we have been forcing more and more farmers into tenancy. Today, forty percent of all the farmers in the great Valley are tenants. Ten percent are sharecroppers. Down on their knees in the valley. A share of the crop their only security: no home, no land of their own, aimless, footloose and impoverished. Unable to eat even from the land. Because their cash crop is their only livelihood, credit at the store their only reserve.132

The lament harkens back to Jefferson’s vision of yeoman republicanism—where land owning white farmers provide the backbone of American democracy. While the narration mourns the white tenant farmers on screen, black tenant farmers (who were far more likely to be caught in tenancy and sharecropping schemes133) are literally disappeared from the frame.

The work of landscape in this scene is discord. Whereas in earlier scenes black laborers and cotton fields merged in visual harmony, white laborers and the cotton landscape appear at odds with each other and provide the clear message that something is unnatural in this landscape.

The conditions of landlessness and poverty for indigenous peoples and African-Americans that were fundamental to the Plantation when applied to white laborers become unnatural and worthy of the USDA’s attention. While the Plantation always produced white class stratification, with

132 The River, 22:27 133 In Natchez “practically all (94 per cent) of the 1,337 tenants in Old County in 1930 were colored.” Davis, et al, 295 Harmon 59 the breakdown of the ecological and racial modes of production in the 1930’s, more and more white farmers found themselves as tenants. The USDA identified a Plantation in crisis (voiceover on shots of young white boys in tenant family):

And a generation growing up with no new land in the west. No new continent to build. A generation whose people knew Kings Mountain and Shiloh. A generation whose people knew Fremont and Custer. But a generation facing a life of dirt and poverty, disease and drudgery. Growing up without proper food, medical care or schooling. Ill clad, ill housed, and ill fed. And in the greatest river valley in the world.134

The fear is not only that the land will no longer sustain cotton production, or even that the

Plantation system has begun to enlist white people into its labor force, but that there will be no new generation of heroic white men. The material worry is that without any “new land” in the west, the ability to own and the produce are foreclosed for this new generation of white men.

Without a “new continent to build,” there will be nowhere to grow and expand, no needed capacity of white patriarchy to extend over space through physical infrastructures. Capital is already tied up in a built continent. Without great battles over land and independence, what will become of the white man’s character? The US government is explicitly expressing the anxiety, at the faltering of the Plantation, that there will be no Fremont or Custer in this new generation, no colonial heroes and no indigeneity through which to transit on the road to white supremacy and control of land.

The USDA connects the ecological exhaustion of Plantation agriculture to US settler colonial anxiety at the closing of the frontier. The final line, “And in the greatest river valley in the world,” invokes landscape as the final evidence of the unnaturalness of white poverty and landlessness. Implicit in the USDA’s vision of the “greatest river valley in the world,” is white ownership of land, black people happily working the fields, and an ever-expanding frontier of

US Empire through which the expansion of capital and white supremacy remains inevitable.

134 The River, 24:05 Harmon 60

Flooding Toward a Fix

A century after Warren first mapped the Dakotas for commercial possibilities and military conquest, the Corps moved up the Missouri River under the banner of flood protection, irrigation, navigation, and power generation. In 1944, Congress passed a new Flood Control Act that pushed forward the Army Corp’s massive Pick-Sloane Dam project. As the Army Corps’ history puts it:

The 1944 Flood Control Act signaled the victory of the multipurpose approach. It empowered the secretary of the interior to sell power produced at Corps and other federal projects. The act also authorized the gigantic multipurpose civil works project for the Missouri Basin commonly called the Pick-Sloan Plan… These dams were all multipurpose. They provided flood control, irrigation, navigation, water supply, hydropower, and recreation.135

Today, the Bureau of Reclamation claims, “the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program has provided an accumulated $2,335,639,000 in flood control benefits from 1950 to 1999.”136 How one measures the monetary benefits of floods that were prevented is somewhat unclear, but the costs of floods that were engineered by the Corps are easier to comprehend. Using a combination of eminent domain and Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act, (granting the Corps jurisdiction over “navigable waters of the United States”) the Army Corps of Engineers violated the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had legally codified control over land and water to the Great Sioux

Nation. The Army Corps’ dam project, ostensibly meant to mitigate flood damage, flooded over

200,000 acres of indigenous land, dispossessing thousands of people of their land, water, and subsistence practices. The Oahe Dam, which “destroyed more Native land than any other public

135 United States Army Corps of Engineers, “A Brief History: Multipurpose Waterway Development.” https://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Brief-History-of-the-Corps/Multipurpose-Waterway-Development/ accessed March 23rd 2018. 136 United States Bureau of Reclamation. “Projects and Facilities: Pick Sloan Missouri Basin Program.” https://www.usbr.gov/projects/index.php?id=380 accessed March 28, 2018. Harmon 61 works project in America,” meant a loss to the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River

Nations of their most valuable bottomland, ecological diversity, timber, and cultural sites.137

The water of the Missouri River, under the managerial control of the Army Corps, became a tool in indigenous dispossession through the “natural” phenomenon of the flood. When the river swelled behind the dams, the Army Corps had legal jurisdiction to all the inundated

Sioux land, because it was now a waterway of the United States instead of sovereign territory.

Eighty years after Custer’s death, and just ten years after the USDA’s lament, the U.S. government and a new generation of white engineers had dispossessed hundreds of thousands of acres of indigenous land for the purposes of flood control, energy production and the unhampered flow of commodities.

By the time of the 1944 Flood Control Act, the plantations along the Mississippi that had depended upon cheap black labor, global demand for cotton and cane, and easy access to credit began to lose value. The capital that had once been embodied in slaves had disappeared, and the rapid flow of commodity and credit had slowed to a trickle. Soil was washing into the river and blowing into the air. Capital needed a place to move to be realized in new form, the plantation house became a holding pen for stagnating capital, and the field a sink. In 1940, the Uncle Sam

Plantation, once owned by Samuel Fagot, one of the wealthiest landowners in St. James parish, was destroyed by the Army Corps to make way for a new levee. One person remarked on seeing the demolition: “‘And as the workmen hurried to demolish the remaining structure[s] to make way for the levee, the mighty Mississippi ate greedily, lazily licked its banks and then, lowering its waves as if in shame, rolled slowly on—an amazing chapter of the South’s romantic history

137 Rose, Christina. “Echoes of Oak Flat: 4 Pick Sloan Dams that Submerged Native Land.” Indian Country Media Network, August 14th, 2017. https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/history/events/echoes-of-oak-flat-4-pick-sloan- dams-that-submerged-native-lands/ accessed January 24th, 2018. Schneiders, Robert Kelley. "Flooding the Missouri Valley: the Politics of Dam Site Selection and Design." Great Plains Quarterly 17, no. 3/4 (1997), 238 Harmon 62 closing in its wake.’”138

(fig. 6)139

The personification of the river in the observer’s account from 1940 echoes surprisingly clearly in the 2016 short video produced by the Army Corps called “River of Life”: “From beginning to end, the muddy waters of the mighty Mississippi have flowed since the last ice age, forging new paths, washing away the past, and building a new future (my emphasis).”140 When the Army Corps destroyed the Uncle Sam Plantation, it was indeed an end to a particular chapter along the Mississippi, better described as horrific rather than romantic. However, the geography of the plantation persisted beyond the physical plantation house, despite the painfully obvious desire on behalf of the Army Corps for a River that “washes away the past.” The Mississippi is precisely what makes visible the material manifestations of the past. The geographic

138 Matrana, Marc R. "Louisiana." In Lost Plantations of the South, 177-226. University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Pg. 219 139 “Time and the River Win Again; Uncle Sam Plantation Mansion Passes,” The Times-Picayune, March 10, 1940. 140 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Rock Island District. “The Mississippi—River of Life,” 2016. 17:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkvhBfAstMU Harmon 63 characteristics of the antebellum plantation are important precisely because they have been in different ways re-animated and re-spatialized along the Mississippi. In 1940, the organization of people, capital, and space embodied in the Uncle Sam big house was demolished in order to literally make room for the next iteration of river control and commodity production. Two thousand miles upriver, engineers had already begun preparing to flood Sioux territory to solidify river control.

In the 18th century, land that was flooded and “empty except for the Indian” had been redeemed by dispossession, river control and chattel slavery into cotton and sugar cane plantations. In the 20th century, these same cotton and sugar cane plantations had become an agricultural wasteland.141 The River was washing away the topsoil, cotton was losing value,

African-Americans were leaving the South and plantation houses were in ruins. The land (at least according to the USDA) was once again wasted: “poor land makes poor people, and poor people make poor land.”142 But this time, the land was constructed as empty except for African-

American communities, many founded by free slaves on the banks of the Mississippi. A century after Andrew Jackson formally enacted his policy of Indian Removal, a new process of dispossession was about to take place upon a newly produced uninhabitable geography where

African-Americans and the Houma people lived. The characteristics of plantation geography were about to be re-spatialized under an all too familiar program of river control and a new infrastructure of industrial redemption.

141 See 21:15 of The River for an incredibly explicit rendering of the wasted land. 142 The River 21:35 Harmon 64

From Plantations to Plants: Building the Chemical Corridor

Capitalism has found itself able to attenuate (if not resolve) its internal contradictions for a century, and consequently, in the hundred years since the writing of Capital, it has succeeded in achieving ‘growth.’ We cannot calculate at what price, but we do know the means: by occupying space, by producing a space. Henri Levebvre, Survival of Capitalism143

At the turn of the 20th century, oil had been discovered in Louisiana. Over the next several decades, oil and gas infrastructure in the United States would rapidly proliferate, as would the global economy’s reliance on fossil fuels. The move to bring industry to the South was deliberate on the part of Planters: the “Delta Council used Balance Agriculture with Industry

(BAWI) bonds to subsidize plant relocations and construction expenses. The change in the Delta

Council’s position reflected its desire to provide stable employment for a declining White population.”144 Many whites found jobs in plants and refineries on old Plantation sites. While by no means ending white poverty, fossil fuel infrastructure and increased mechanization allowed for the visual discordance of white tenant farmers working in cotton fields to diminish.

According to Dr. Beverly Wright, “they [planters] also cut deals with the petrochemical companies basically saying that they would not hire African Americans, because they wanted them to work in their fields…Even today, the majority of African Americans who work in plants, don’t work in their own Parish…because if they had an address that was connected to the plant, they would not be hired.”145 The massive process of leveeing the banks of the lower Mississippi and damming the upper Mississippi and Missouri was undertaken so that, in the words of the

1947 Army Corps of Engineers film, “industry can now safely bring its factories to the banks of

143 Lefebvre, Henri. The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production. St. Martin's Press, 1976 144 Woods, 162. 145 Dr. Beverly Wright (Deep South Center for Environmental Justice), Interviewed by Max Harmon and Brad Geismar, Dillard University, October 2016 Harmon 65 the river.”146 As new automobiles sped along the modern roads of United States—southern roads often built by black men and women locked together at the ankle on chain gangs—oil money began transforming the land and shores of Louisiana into seeping wells of liquid capital. Oil was only worth something if it could be made to move—piped, barged, transported, shipped. Those who had seen the way cotton flowed up and down the Mississippi and its tributaries and across the Atlantic Ocean recognized a possibility for a new commodity flow through the cotton kingdom. Plantations gave way to Plants.

Shell’s website provides a brief history of its operations in Norco: “In 1916, the New

Orleans Refining Company purchased 366 acres of sugar cane field from the Goodhope

Plantation … In 1920, the New Orleans Refining Company began refining oil and thus the name of the town – Norco … The chemical plant was added in 1955.”147 When Richard Airey of Royal

Dutch Shell purchased part of the Good Hope Plantation, he was doing so adjacent to another process of land claiming: “After the Civil War, when the plantation [Trepagnier, shown as

Myrtleland on Norman’s chart, later called Diamond Plantation] was abandoned by its owners, many of the freed slaves continued to occupy their old slave cottages; others moved into the plantation house.”148 Freedmen and women along the Mississippi claimed and cultivated land that had been used for their enslavement, creating robust communities such as Belltown (on the former Diamond Plantation). The uninhabitable wasteland was in fact a thriving human geography. In 1955, though no written record of the transaction exists, Shell “added” the land of

Belltown to convert it into a new chemical plant, displacing residents to the area in between

Shell’s facilities, renamed Diamond. One Diamond resident recounts the incident: “’We were

146 United States Army Corps of Engineers, Valley of the Giant, 1947. 25:45 147 Shell; About NORCO; https://www.shell.us/about-us/projects-and-locations/norco-manufacturing- complex/about-norco.html. Accessed March 5, 2018. 148 Lerner, Steve, and Robert D. Bullard. Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor. MIT Press, 2006. Pg. 12 Harmon 66 here first. We were just run off [and told to] get over there. [We were told by Shell] “We are going to put this [chemical plant] here whether you like it or not.”…The big corporations…you can’t win with them.’”149 According to Dr. Beverly Wright, founder and director of the Deep

South Center for Environmental Justice, displacement “’is not an uncommon story for black communities along the river… Some families were moved two or three times—not just by industries moving in, but also by the Army Corps of Engineers, which moved whole communities when they built the levees and the Bonnet Carre Spillway…They moved where they were told to move and the decision about where they were going to be moved was made by others…not by them.’”150 Shell Norco is currently “recognized as one of the largest and foremost petrochemical facilities in the United States.”151 It has released more than 1,917,606 pounds of benzene, “a known human carcinogen,” into the air since 1988.152

According to Dow Chemical’s website, “Dow came to Louisiana in 1956, drawn by the state’s abundant natural resources, excellent transportation network, deep water port, easy access to the Mississippi River, dedicated workforce and available land.”153 Dow’s rationale echoes with the 1831 description of the potential of the Mississippi river sugar cane plantation described in Senator Johnston’s letter: the land is naturally suited to this kind of production, the river provides a natural commodity conduit, and possibilities for global trade are easily accessible.

Dow’s mention of a “dedicated workforce and available land” is particularly haunting— conjuring to mind Olmsted’s description of “tall, slender, sinewy, young men, who worked from dawn to dusk, not with spirit, but with steadiness and constancy” upon land made “available”

149 Audrey Eugene, quoted by Lerner 2006, pg. 22 150 Dr. Beverly Wright, quoted by Lerner 2006, pg. 22 151 Shell; About NORCO; https://www.shell.us/about-us/projects-and-locations/norco-manufacturing- complex/about-norco.html. Accessed March 5, 2018. 152 Misrach, Richard, and Kate Orff. Petrochemical America. Aperture, 2012. 151 153 Dow: Louisiana Operations; https://www.dow.com/en-us/about-dow/locations/louisiana/locations/operations accessed on March 5, 2018. Harmon 67 through the dispossession of indigenous peoples.154

The Houma Indians, who had migrated south away from French settlement began to encounter problems with oil and gas companies in the 1930’s. Their land, which had been deemed uninhabitable by settler capital because of flooding, could be redeemed only through the newly discovered value of extraction and the oil rig. A white anthropologist who lived with the

Houma in the 1960’s explains some of the dimensions of the situation. Note the resonance with

Tocqueville’s account of colonial violence as “age-old” and “ancient:”

The Houma live on top of one of the richest natural gas and petroleum fields in the United States. Exploitation of the wildlife resources on which the Houma exist, the age- old complaint of Indians against whites, goes on apace. The oil on the land has led to increasing agitation among the Indians to reclaim the land they feel is rightfully theirs. Various legal procedures formerly unintelligible to them, have lost the Houma their land titles. Although the land is immensely valuable, it is my opinion, after five years of trying sporadically to get legal help to untangle the problem, that it would cost more than the land is worth to resolve the matter.155

Without federal recognition, the Houma have no legal basis upon which to articulate land claims.

Their dispossession is justified because of the prior condemnation of the space—settler capital is unearthing value, creating jobs, and redeeming the landscape. From the perspective of power, there is nothing to untangle.

The “availability of land” Dow references is of course the product of the settler colonial geography of the antebellum plantation, but it is also grounded in the contemporary ability of companies to displace indigenous people and African-Americans from their land. Companies like Dow and Shell who were “drawn” to the banks of the Mississippi, to already existing plantation parcels, were still capitalizing on a plantation geography that rendered African-

Americans materially devoid of “proof” of ownership (or courts that would uphold such proof

154 Olmsted, pg. 14 155 Fischer, Ann. "History and Current Status of the Houma Indians." Midcontinent American Studies Journal 6, no. 2, 1965: 149-63. Harmon 68 even if a deed could be found) and symbolically incompatible with owning the land of the plantations. Dow’s Louisiana Operations facility on the banks the Mississippi is currently one of the “largest petrochemical facilities” in the state.156 Since 1988, this facility disposed of more than 960,779 pounds of the “known endocrine disruptor and suspected carcinogen” styrene onto adjacent land.157 In 2009, the Times Picayune reported that “Some Hahnville residents can't go home because of leak at Dow.”158 The leak turned out to be more than 26,000 pounds of vaporized ethyl acrylate.159

Not long after the Army Corps of Engineers apparently closed the door on Mississippi river plantations, the Freeport Minerals Company purchased the Uncle Sam Plantation and transformed it into what, in the 1960’s, was the largest petrochemical facility in the world.160

Today, the Mosaic Phosphate Company, one of the largest fertilizer manufacturers in the world, owns the facility. Over the last two decades, the Uncle Sam facility (still named after its antebellum ancestor) has released into the air more than 6,492,892 pounds of carcinogenic sulfuric acid.161

In 1976, Marathon Petroleum bought out the Garyville Refinery which itself was purchased from the land of the San Francisco Plantation (Marmillon on Norman’s Chart). In the genealogy of land ownership along the Mississippi, the fossil fuel corporation is in many cases only a few exchanges removed from the antebellum plantation. Just down the river is the town of

Lions, founded by former slaves. Unlike the Uncle Sam plantation house that was “washed into the past,” Marathon has contributed some of its vast wealth to the preservation of the antebellum

156 Dow: Louisiana Operations; https://www.dow.com/en-us/about-dow/locations/louisiana/locations/operations accessed on March 5, 2018. 157 Misrach and Orff. 151 158 Duke, Brett. “Some Hahnville residents can't go home because of leak at Dow.” The Times Picayune. July 07, 2009 159 Vaporized ethyl acrylate is a Class II Toxic Air Pollutant. 160 Wilcke, Gerd. “Fertilizer Makers Join Forces at Single Plant.” The New York Times. June 14, 1971, Page 59 161 Misrach and Orff. 151 Harmon 69

San Francisco Plantation House, and has recently played a part in changing the content of the plantation tour to better reflect the contributions of black slaves: according to the human resources manager at Marathon in 2017, “Until recently, tourists visiting the plantation could take a guided tour of the house that provided little information or focus on the enslaved people whose forced labor made the plantation sustainable.” Now, “The house tour is more rounded and includes the role of enslaved people in everyday life.”162

Marathon, from its vantage on the banks of the Mississippi is the third largest fossil fuel refinery in the United States, and is literally in the business of telling the history of slavery and the Plantation. Marathon has integrated the San Francisco Plantation into its operation so that it can selectively narrate a history of racial oppression in order to claim temporal distance from a site of violence. But the spatial overlaps belie this claim, for Marathon’s yearly profits come from their claim to land based on their purchase of Marmillon’s plantation, and a current operation reliant upon Marathon’s ability to poison air, land, and non-white people. Marathon has released hundreds of thousands of pounds of benzene into the air since 1988.163 While the historical legacies of settler colonialism and slavery are often obfuscated within other sites of the contemporary economy, here on the Mississippi, the CEO still owns the Big House.

Poisoning and Buyouts

The Exxon facility in Baton Rouge was originally constructed by Standard Oil in the early 20th century on former cotton plantations. It marks the beginning of a stretch of the

Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, once famous for its massive sugar

162 Hightower, Keith. “San Francisco Plantation experience now includes balanced telling.” L’Observatur Feb. 2017. http://www.lobservateur.com/2017/02/01/hightower-san-francisco-plantation-experience-now-includes-balanced- telling/ accessed March 29, 2018 163 Misrach and Orff. 151 Harmon 70 plantations that became known in the 1980’s as “Bhopal on the Bayou” and “Cancer Ally.”

Hundreds of petrochemical, fossil fuel, and agro-industrial facilities line the 150 miles of river.

“Between Baton Rouge and New Orleans there are close to three hundred facilities,” explains

Marylee Orr of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network: “That’s a lot of pollution for people to absorb.”164

The contemporary geography of white, corporate ownership is overlaid on the still existing geography of the antebellum plantation, where African-American communities from reconstruction are, as Dr. Beverly Wright puts it, “living and dying on the fence line.” The plantations near Plaquemine, which Dow purchased in the 1950’s, neighbored the free-slave town of Morrisonville. After residents of Morrisonville began to get sick and file lawsuits, Dow began a buy-out program in 1989 to create a “safety zone.” As a consultant for the New York based company that Dow contracted to manage Morrisonville’s relocation put it: "From a business sense, it is economically sound. There are potential toxic torts and if there is an accident it has an impact on worldwide sales.”165 The economic logic of the buyout captures the racism of the landscape, in which violence does not register on the corporate radar until its effects become costly. For decades, it had been cheap to poison African-American communities—but by the

1990’s it would be cheaper to relocate them.

Marylee Orr has witnessed the wave of buyouts along the Chemical Corridor. “When I started this work [in the 1980’s]…one of the things they talked about was that buyouts were going to be the way of the future. In fact that proved to be true,” explained Orr: “Exxon would

164 Orr, Marylee (Louisiana Environmental Action Network), interviewed by Max Harmon and Brad Geismar, Baton Rouge, LA, October 2016. Orr leads the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, a group that supports communities struggling against industrial neighbors with legal assistance, toxicology expertise, and political organizing. 165 Schneider, Keith. “Chemical Plants Buy Up Neighbors for Safety Zone.” The New York Times. November 28, 1990. Harmon 71 say they didn’t have a buyout, that they have a “greenzone.” If we took you down scenic highway, you’d see the area where they bought all the homes out… It has to be a fair, equitable and just buyout, and that is not always the case.”166 In the 1990’s, as communities gathered strength following industrial accidents that killed workers at Exxon and Shell facilities, and as decades of pollution became increasingly evident in health impacts, industries up and down the

Mississippi River countered with buy-out programs. Shell, Exxon, Dow, Georgia Gulf, and

Placid are just some of the corporations involved in large-scale community buyouts, all deals that absolved them of any health liability. In 2015, Mosaic’s Uncle Sam Plant (still named after its antebellum ancestor) settled a $2 billion lawsuit regarding sixty billion pounds of hazardous waste it had allegedly mishandled, harming adjacent communities. Mosaic admitted no fault.167

While industry likes to frame buyout programs as a function of “corporate responsibility,” the genealogy of the plantation offers a different lens: dispossession through legal and extra-legal violence.168 Following the brief moment of African-American land acquisition during reconstruction, whites systematically dispossessed African-Americans of land.

The overt violence of the lynch mob and other forms of intimidation reinforced the lack of legal protection African-Americans had under private property regimes. Tenancy schemes and criminalization also functioned to tie blacks to land while preventing their ability to own. Despite the overthrow of reconstruction land redistribution and planter’s reconsolidation of control over land and labor, by 1910 African Americans had acquired “more than fifteen million acres of farmland on their own without the help of government land grants.” By 1997, African-

166 Interview with Marylee Orr, October 2016. 167 Schleifstein, Mark. “Mosaic Fertilizer pledges $2 billion to settle hazardous waste complaints.” The Times Picayune. October 1, 2015 168 In Shell’s buyout of Diamond, they attempted to require environmental justice groups to remove any mention of the political struggle from their websites. Using underhanded tactics, they got residents (Concerned Citizens of Norco) to sign a joint statement that explicitly stated “CCN declares that these options demonstrate Shell’s commitment to the Diamond Neighborhood.” From Lerner and Bullard, 250. Harmon 72

Americans owned less than one sixth of what they had nearly a century earlier.169

Systematic displacement and dispossession of African-Americans along the Mississippi

River is grounded in a structural shift in production strategies that began in the 1930’s. Through political organizations such as the Delta Council and National Cotton Commission, white planters and landowners in coalition with politicians and government agencies were able to direct federal capital and capacity into programs tending toward the mechanization of agriculture, the obsolescence of black labor, the introduction of industry, and the eviction of

African-Americans. The Agricultural Adjustment Act massively subsidized white landowners who let their lands lie fallow, and allowed them to decrease their reliance on sharecropping labor. The USDA established a research station in Stoneville, MS devoted to developing a modernized cotton economy dependent on chemicals and machines instead of unruly labor. In the late 19th century, sugar plantation owners had attempted to diminish African-American’s collective power by importing Chinese immigrants to work Louisiana’s sugar cane. In 1948, the

Delta Council “obtained” two thousand Mexican workers for the cotton harvest, justifying the action on the basis of a “labor shortage” that they themselves were engineering.170

Levee construction along the Mississippi was yet another technology to displace African-

Americans under the guise of racially neutral and universally beneficial “flood protection” carried out by the Army Corps. Spillways designated as flood release channels were also zoned through black communities. Clyde Woods argues, “municipal councils, county supervisorial boards, levee boards, and the regional branches of state and federal agencies, such as the United

States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Army Corps of Engineers were all considered

169 Bullard, Robert D., and Beverly Wright. "The Legacy of Bias: Hurricanes, Droughts, and Floods." In The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities, 67. NYU Press, 2012. 170 Jung, Moon-Ho. Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. JHU Press, 2006; Woods, 163 Harmon 73 adjuncts of the [Delta] council.”171 Throughout the 20th century, “white bankers, federal loan agencies (the Farmers Home Administration and the Federal Land Bank) and local merchants conspired to force blacks into foreclosure. There have been examples of reprisals against blacks who helped fellow blacks save their land.”172 In 1947, Oscar Johnston of the Delta Council put it this way:

The picker is going to put people out of work. Nothing gets around that. Some people say 2,000,000 in 20 years, others say 5,000,000 in five years. What will happen to them? God only knows…Some will move away from the South perhaps, and if it lessens our Southern percentage of colored population and increases it in other places, the race problem will be easier for us to handle and for other places to understand.173

Nearly forty years later, another planter articulated the overall strategy of African-American displacement with his vision for the future: “Ten years down the pike, I see beautiful fields of cotton and soybeans, the growth of industry, and a program to encourage out-migration, which will solve a lot of problems.”174 Contemporary corporate buyouts after decades of poisoning are part of this historical legacy.

Corporate buyouts of African-American communities along the Mississippi River must also be understood in the context of the material violence associated with industrial production.

As one resident of Morrisonville said in 1990, "Dow doesn't pay for attachment to land, for the inheritance that is in this community."175 Residents who engage in the “voluntary buyout” are doing so because they are in physical danger, even if the legal system refuses to acknowledge that danger. The “choice” to be displaced from “an attachment to land” and the “inheritance that is in this community” is only made in the context of extra-legal violence perpetrated by

171 Woods, 124. 172 Browne, Robert S. Only Six Million Acres: The Decline of Black Owned Land in the Rural South (New York: Black Economic Research Center, June 1973), Appendix D. See also Bullard, Robert D., and Beverly Wright. "The Legacy of Bias: Hurricanes, Droughts, and Floods,” for analysis of racially uneven access to USDA disaster relief. 173 National Cotton Council, Report of the Proceedings of the Beltwide Cotton Mechanization Conference, 1947, 22. 174 Porter, Judith. “What Works and What Doesn’t? Perceptions of Economic Development Among Delta Leaders,” in Cosby et al., 1992, 307. 175 Schneider, Keith. “Chemical Plants Buy Up Neighbors for Safety Zone.” Harmon 74 corporations. The homes people own along the Mississippi often constitute multiple generations worth of wealth accumulation as well community networks of support and attachment to land.

Industrial pollution has destroyed the value of homes, such that residents are unable to sell their homes on the market in order to move. The value embedded in their homes from their parents’ labor and their own has vanished from the home’s exchange value. Residents most often do not have the money to move if they wanted to. Residents who have spoken up against corporations have received threats, and Wilma Subra, a lead chemist for the Louisiana Environmental Action

Network has been shot at and had her workplace broken into on multiple occasions.176 As one resident of Diamond (between two Shell facilities on the Mississippi) explained: “’I stay inside…I had my back door and front door closed because you don’t want to inhale all that stuff but I hate to be locked up in the house: I feel like I’m in a prison.’”177

According to Marylee Orr, “the number one reason children miss school is because of asthma. The adult onset of asthma is increasing. Death by asthma is increasing. So then you have the other cancers, we find rare clusters of cancers, neuroblastomas…So through the years, Wilma

[Subra] in particular has studied these clusters of cancer, they are very unusual.”178 While official health reports are shaky (due in large part to corporate influence over state government and EPA Region VI), work by chemist Wilma Subra has exposed high incidence of neuroblastomas and other rare cancers proximate to petrochemical and fossil fuel operations in

Louisiana.179 A 1990 report by the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission found that “Acidity levels of precipitation in the Lower Mississippi Valley have reached pH’s of 3.0-

4.0, or the acidity of vinegar. This is the result of air emissions from heavy

176 Marylee Orr (Louisiana Environmental Action Network), interviewed by Max Harmon and Brad Geismar, Baton Rouge, LA, October 2016. 177 Lerner, Steve, and Robert D. Bullard. pg. 57 178 Marylee Orr, October 2016. 179 Ibid. Harmon 75 industry…populations along certain reaches of the river have some of the highest cancer- incidence rates in the nation and breathing problems are common.”180 Just as black slaves bore the physical cost of production through their labor in the fields, so too do African-Americans bear the physical costs of contemporary production through air pollution and respiratory illness, toxic river water and bioaccumulation in fish, poisoned soil and lack of access to food:

For instance, we’re working on the chloroprene issue in LaPlace [near Norco]. Wilma goes in and looks at all the air data that the EPA and DEQ take in. In 2015, the EPA looked at levels of chloroprene. They looked at all of the United States. Guess where the most chloroprene was released? Right here in Louisiana. Massive amounts. These people have been exposed for forty-seven years. It was a Dupont facility and then they sold it to Denka a year ago… Huge levels by their school. It’s very scary. They get up and talk about, ‘my neighbor has cancer, I have cancer, I have headaches.” Sadly things I’ve heard for decades. And this is a predominately, if not completely, African-American area.181

Whereas the source of the environmental violence brought upon African-Americans is capitalist industry, corporations constantly seek to obscure and redirect attention to either a landscape that naturalizes African-American sickness, or to pathologize African-Americans as the source of their own suffering.182 If African-American communities are able to organize enough political power to make things complicated for the industry, then land is bought out: dispossession by environmental racism concealed as industry responsibility and generosity. This history of pollution related relocations must be put alongside the history of other strategies of dispossession in the South, including racial terrorism, debt peonage, labor importation, and government loan discrimination.

The contemporary geography of the Mississippi Chemical Corridor (which Dr. Beverly

180 LMDDC, Proceedings of the Conference on Economics, Energy, and the Environment, in the Lower Mississippi Delta (Memphis: LMDDC, 1990) C29-30. Cited in Woods, pg. 265. 181 Interview with Marylee Orr, October 2016. See also, Hasselle, Della. “St. John residents sue LaPlace plant over chloroprene emissions; suit seeks class action status.” The New Orleans Advocate, July 3rd 2017. 182 For a report on the above average cancer incidence in St. John the Baptist Parish, see: Subra, Wilma. “Cancer Incidence Rates by Census Tract in St John the Baptist Parish, 2006-2014.” Louisiana Environmental Action Network, 2018: https://leanweb.org/public-health/cancer-incidence-rates-census-tract-st-john-baptist-parish-2006- 2014/ Accessed April 10th 2018. Harmon 76

Wright calls a “strange fruit map”) was possible precisely because of the system of private property and inheritance that enshrined the racial and settler power structure of the plantation through land ownership. White planters sold vast plantations to resource-exploiting corporations.

African-Americans remained on the margin. The continual process of accumulation by dispossession, the tendency of capitalism to both produce and consume devalued spaces reproduced plantation geographies in new forms. African-Americans along the Mississippi have been displaced in various moments, through what Jack Kirby has called the four stages of the neo-plantation:

The capitalization of planters through the AAA crop reduction program and other subsidies during the early 1930’s; the mass eviction of sharecroppers; the dominance of the tractor and wage labor regime by the early 1940’s; and, by the mid-1950’s, by the introduction of the mechanical cotton picker, the elimination of hired labor, and the diversification [industrialization] of the regional economy.183

To these stages must be added the more contemporary phenomenon of produced sickness and subsequent buyouts as mechanisms of displacement. Today, according to the 1999 Agricultural

Economics and Land Ownership Survey, African-Americans own less than one percent of land in the United States.184

Flows of Commodity, Capital, and Waste

The industries that dominate the banks of the Mississippi today include the agribusiness giants, Cargill, Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, and Monsanto; the petrochemical corporations,

Dow, Dupont, Mosiac, and the fossil fuel operations, Shell, Exxon, and Marathon. The particular nexus of these three main groups—agribusiness, petrochemical, and fossil fuel—is no accident.

From slaves and cotton, the Mississippi River became a circulatory system of grain commodity,

183 Woods, 159-60. Citing: Kirby, Jack Temple. Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960. LSU Press, 1986. 63-75. 184 Bullard, Robert D., and Beverly Wright. "The Legacy of Bias: Hurricanes, Droughts, and Floods,” pg. 67. Harmon 77 fossil fuels, petrochemicals, toxins, and profit. Fossil fuel corporations extract oil in Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico and pipe it to refineries along the lower Mississippi River. Refineries then barge petroleum products upstream or into oceangoing vessels for global export. Shell chemists after WWII “began to realize that a number of their waste streams could be refashioned for sale,” including “synthetic nitrogen fertilizer… detergents, solvents, anti-freeze, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, perfumes, and artificial sweeteners,”185 And so from petroleum derivatives grew the petrochemical industry along the river whose products are barged upriver and sprayed on the fields of the South and Midwest to counteract the ecological devastation of industrial agriculture. Grain commodities, mostly corn and soybeans, are barged down the river.

Along with the grain commodity itself, the petrochemicals applied to the fields runoff in a thousand streams and rivulets down into the Mississippi River, a process sped up and intensified by the poor water retention of exhausted soils. The toxins flow down the river, bio accumulating in fish, and creating the hypoxic zone (oxygen depleted, dead-zone) in the Gulf of Mexico, deeply harming fisheries and fishing communities. Toxins flow into water, soil, air, and bloodstreams. Profits flows into the hands of landowners (most of whom are not farmers themselves), fossil fuel and petrochemical executives, and bankers who finance the operation.

Most people profiting from the river live nowhere near it.

The current concentration of wealth on the Lower Mississippi is at a scale beyond that of even the antebellum plantation. While white executive salaries of riverside industries are well over two hundred and fifty times greater than the median income in Louisiana and Mississippi, the gap is even greater considering the median income for African-Americans in these States.186

185 Lerner, Steve, and Robert D. Bullard, pg. 87 186 Household income by State: https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Louisiana/Household-Income#figure/median- household-income-by-race Accessed March 10th, 2018 Executive Salaries by Company: Harmon 78

Greater still, is the wealth gap between African-Americans and whites, which actually presents a fundamentally different picture of the operation of the economy than does income. While a discussion about income can rightfully focus on inequality and labor exploitation, a discussion about wealth accumulation leads to the ways in which intergenerational transfer of wealth, property ownership, and returns on capital have been denied to African Americans. Some studies extrapolating current trends find that median African-American wealth in the United States will be at zero by 2050.187

In the 18th and 19th centuries, plantations owners were able to obtain credit from banks on the basis of the value they controlled embedded in land and slaves. In other words, the more land and labor a plantation owner had, the greater their ability to obtain capital to finance improvements to his operation or weather times of recession. Plantations were capitalized in large part on their ability to successfully organize enslaved people into predictable and productive units of labor.

Fossil fuel corporations’ stock prices are, among other things, reflections of fuel reserves, and their future ability to transport, refine, and sell their commodities. Fossil fuel corporations are capitalized on the basis of their future ability to secure each step in their products’ realization. But as we know, the smooth realization of petroleum commodity, or grain commodity, is contingent on the exploitation, displacement, and poisoning of people in the processes of extraction, transportation, and production. Returns on capital investment are literally predicated on the maintenance of the existing system of racial hierarchy from which the possibility of such a production process emerged and continues to constitute. The 2007 Report

https://www1.salary.com/R-W-Tillerson-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Options-for-EXXON-MOBIL-CORP.html Accessed April 28th, 2018. 187 Wolff, Edward N. "Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2013: What Happened over the Great Recession?." RSF (2016). Harmon 79

Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty by Robert D. Bullard, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha, and Beverly

Wright, found that “race continues to be the predominant explanatory factor in facility locations and clearly still matters.”188 While income measures reveal the degree to which African-

American labor is still exploited in ways consistent with plantation labor, a focus on plantation geography indicates an organization of production that profits not only through the laboring black body, but also the sick, incarcerated, and displaced black body in specific places.

Each step in the solidification of the industrial riverscape in the 20th century built upon the existing racial geography of the plantation to create a new geography that relentlessly capitalized upon and reproduced African-American landlessness, sickness, and disempowerment.

In 1955, Merle Prunty wrote a seminal article entitled “The Renaissance of the Southern

Plantation,” in which he argued via a “fourfold thesis,” “as spatial entities the plantations are with us still:”

(1) Since ante bellum days the plantation landholding has provided a relatively constant spatial framework that, by its size, has conditioned the occupance forms developed within it, producing major similarities from one occupance stage to the next. (2) The plantation landholding has supported two related land-occupance forms until recently, and a third form is now evolving. The three forms are the ante bellum plantation, the fragmented plantation (of which two subtypes are recognizable: the cropper type, and the tenant type), and the neoplantation, which is currently emerg- ing in association with mechanization of plantation cultivation. (3) Changes from one form to another occurred in response to shifts in the control of cultivating power, conditioned on each occasion by labor conditions. (4) Central management has been characteristic of each for form.189

Writing in 1955, Prunty was just beginning to see the “neoplantation” and what subsequent scholars have called the “southern enclosure movement.”190 Contemporary fossil

188 Bullard, Robert D., Paul Mohai, Robin Saha, and Beverly Wright. "TOXIC WASTES AND RACE AT TWENTY: WHY RACE STILL MATTERS AFTER ALL OF THESE YEARS." Environmental Law 38, no. 2 (2008): pg. 372 189 Prunty, Merle. "The Renaissance of the Southern Plantation." Geographical Review 45, no. 4 (1955). Pg. 460 190 Kirby, Jack Temple. Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960. LSU Press, 1986. Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880. University of Illinois Harmon 80 fuel/petrochemical/agribusiness operations belong within this history, and complement other scholars’ focus on the Mississippi Delta.191 First, a corporation bought out a white landowner (or bank who held the defaulted title) whose claim to land was based upon the intergenerational rewards of settler violence and chattel slavery. Second, in the process of building a facility, the corporations systematically displaced African-American communities established during reconstruction—reducing them to “available land,” and positioning black land dispossession as a primary means through which the river geography of industrial facilities solidified. Third, in the

Jim Crow Era (and beyond) African-Americans were denied work in industrial plants, and denied access to union jobs that genuinely improved the quality of life for many whites near facilities.192 African-Americans were denied work because of racist hiring practices, and more insidiously, because of deals between white farmers and petro-chemical companies meant to ensure African-Americans had no other option for wages other than continuing to work in the fields.193 Fourth, African-American residents forced to live adjacent to facilities due to the pre- existing geography of the plantation, bore the physical cost of industrial production, experiencing various kinds of toxic contamination and pollution. The stranglehold on government by corporations and white elites in both Louisiana and Mississippi has also meant that federal health programs (limited as they are) often do not reach these communities. And fifth, after decades of community organizing, and decades of being knowingly poisoned by Corporations, residents are able to secure a buyout. They receive no compensation for health costs and part of the settlement ensures that the corporation confess no health-related liability. Even “victories” along the

Press, 1986. Woods, Clyde. Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta. London and New York: Verso (1998). 191 While I’m focusing on the river infrastructure of southern Louisiana (Baton Rouge to New Orleans), most scholars of African-American dispossession have focused on the Mississippi Delta (Memphis to Natchez). 192 Exxon in Baton Rouge has been rapidly decreasing the size of its unionized labor force. Instead, it subcontracts labor within its own facility. Worker power has been undercut and exploitation is rampant. 193 Dr. Beverly Wright (Deep South Center for Environmental Justice), Interviewed by Max Harmon and Brad Geismar, Dillard University, October 2016. Harmon 81

Mississippi result in the dispossession of black land and the fracturing of communities in the service of continued corporate profit.

This geographic progression is underscored by the maintenance of a particular plantation power structure in which plantation owners were often also lawyers, judges, bankers, and senators. Today, according to Dr. Beverly Wright, “In Louisiana, there’s no difference between corporations and government. It’s all the same people…The petrochemical industry grows their own politicians here…. There is no division between petrochemical corporations and our state government.”194

African-American migration out of the south, and the subsequent creation of racial geographies all over the United States, is deeply connected to this particular history of the plantation. The fact that African-Americans were often escaping from systems of debt-peonage, displacement, and various forms of racial violence meant that when they arrived in cities across the US, they had little to no wealth. Scholars have documented the various ways in which New

Deal era government programs, aimed at educational access, home ownership, and land ownership were systematically denied to African-Americans.195 Thus, the geography of the plantation, and flight from its system of debt and displacement, intersects historically with the creation of other racial geographies across the US.

The production of uninhabitality can clearly be seen in US urban geography, where

African-Americans leaving (and fleeing) southern plantations were by and large denied access to finance capital, FHA loans, and GI benefits, excluding them in large part from home and land ownership (perpetuating the plantation ownership arrangement). The segregation of African-

194 Ibid. 195 Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth- Century America. WW Norton & Company, 2005; Connolly, Nathan DB. A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida. University of Chicago Press, 2014; Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press, 1987. Harmon 82

Americans across the United States and the policing of these racialized geographies was/is done in part to protect real-estate values in white neighborhoods and business districts, resonating with the practice of slave patrols to police plantation borders. As industrial jobs and whites increasingly moved away from the urban core following WWII, and white capital fled public institutions supporting urban life, the resulting “ghetto” was created both materially and culturally as a zone of uninhabitability and a sign of racial difference.196 Now, capital is flowing back into the ghettos of US cities, but as a mechanism of displacement commonly referred to as gentrification—the redemption of spaces of produced uninhabitability. These communities are being fractured by the movement of capital to “underdeveloped” zones not as a transfer of wealth but as a contemporary mode of “primitive accumulation.” Hardly a phenomenon limited to

African-Americans, many indigenous people also live either in US cities, or “on or near lands coveted by the resource exploitation industry.”197 Capitalist production maintains itself and navigates crises precisely through the consumption of land that its own operation had previously devalued and marked as uninhabitable.198

Pipelines, River Control, and Environmental Regulation

Just as the plantation house was one site in the larger Plantation geography, so too are the refineries and terminals along Louisiana’s chemical corridor a node in an expansive network.

The contemporary geography of the Mississippi River, much like its antebellum ancestor, is a rigorous organization of commodities, capital, labor, and toxins. Each aspect of the circulation of commodity and capital is dependent upon the continued work of the Army Corps of Engineers to

196 Connolly, Nathan DB. A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida. University of Chicago Press, 2014; Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press, 1987 197 Coulthard, “Wards of the State,” pg. 62. 198 Gidwani and Maringanti. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003 Harmon 83 maintain and expand a river system amenable to this particular political economy: a river navigable by massive barges and ocean vessels, a levee system that keeps land dry enough for heavy mechanization, and a regulatory process that values profit over people. The Mississippi

River under the control of the Army Corps is, as Anna Tsing puts it, a “plantation ecology” with a proliferating tendency to “kill off beings that are not recognized as assets.”199 The determination of what or who constitutes an asset is a historical process intimately shaped by settler colonialism, white supremacy and global capitalism.

While one piece of the Army Corps’ work is securing the river for petroleum barge transit, another is regulating and engineering the massive grid of oil and gas pipelines that run under and alongside the river. Hundreds of thousands of miles of pipeline cut across the Gulf of

Mexico and through Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, under the Mississippi and across the Great

Plains. Many of these pipelines lead to the incredible refining capacity of Texas and Louisiana— much of the oil ends up on the banks of the Mississippi where almost twenty percent of the

United State’s crude oil refining capacity is located.200

The St. James Terminal located on the west bank of the Mississippi between Baton

Rouge and New Orleans is a primary node in the fossil fuel network. Part of the terminal is a US

Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is most often deployed to offset supply shocks to corporate entities during natural disasters. For example, in September of 2012, the Department of

Energy “exchanged 1 MMB with Marathon Oil following Hurricane Isaac due to disruptions to the commercial oil production, refining and distribution operations in the Gulf Coast.”201 In

199 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. "A Threat to Holocene Resurgence Is a Threat to Livability." In The Anthropology of Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2017. Pg. 52 200 Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association: Industry Sectors: http://www.lmoga.com/industry-sectors/ 201 United States Department of Energy: Office of Fossil Fuel: Strategic Petroleum Reserve: https://energy.gov/fe/services/petroleum-reserves/strategic-petroleum-reserve/spr-quick-facts-and-faqs#Q14 Accessed February 12th 2018. Harmon 84 addition to the SPR, Shell has had a twenty-year lease from the Department of Energy (DOE) to operate the St. James Terminal, and for the last decade it has been a primary destination for oil from the Bakken shale in North Dakota.202 Connected via the Capline pipeline to a terminal in

Illinois that services the Bakken and other northern extraction sites, St. James is connected by a vast array of pipelines and rail networks to ever-expanding fossil fuel extraction.

On its way to a transfer terminal in Illinois, the Dakota Access Pipeline crosses the

Missouri River twice, the De Moines River, and the Mississippi River. Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation behind Dakota Access, owns the pipeline from Patoka, Illinois to its Nederland

Terminal in Texas. They are in the process of constructing the Bayou Bridge Pipeline connecting

Nederland to St. James.203 The Bayou Bridge Pipeline cuts across Atakapaw, Chitimacha and

Houma land, and is sited through the historically African-American community of St. James. In

August of 2018, the St. James City Council approved the land use permit necessary for pipeline construction: the vote split along racial lines with four white councilmen approving and the three

African-Americans voting against the pipeline.204 Simply put, Energy Transfer Partners is building a direct line between the Bakken Oil Shale in North Dakota, and the refining capacity of the Mississippi Chemical Corridor. Unsurprisingly, the regulatory body associated with these infrastructure projects and the physical linkages between the Bakken Shale and Louisiana is the

Army Corps of Engineers.

In 1858, Lieutenant Warren of the Army Corps went to Sioux territory to link cartography and military conquest—Warren’s value was in securing the link between the

202 “US Energy Department may retake Shell-run St. James terminal” https://www.platts.com/latest- news/oil/washington/us-energy-department-may-retake-shell-run-st-27670345 203 Map of ETP Pipelines: http://www.sunocologistics.com/Customers/Business-Lines/Crude-Oil/Crude-Oil- Segment-Map/268/

204 Mitchell, David. “St. James Parish Council narrowly approves land use needed for controversial Bayou Bridge pipeline.” The Advocate, August 23rd 2018 Harmon 85

Mississippi and the Missouri, and expanding colonial settlement outward along the river system.

In 1944, the federal Flood Control Act sited the land of the Sioux, already militarily appropriated and diminished through treaty violations, for inundation in the protection of the overall river economy. Fifty-four years after John F. Kennedy’s 1962 official dedication of the Lake Oahe

Dam that dispossessed the Standing Rock Sioux of thousands of acres of land, the Army Corps of Engineers was back in North Dakota overseeing the destruction of Standing Rock Sioux land at the hands of corporate fossil fuel interests. The Dakota Access Pipeline was not the first time the Army Corps of Engineers has been in Sioux territory.

The process that brought the Army Corps to be the authority to issue the final permit for drilling under the Missouri River and completing the Dakota Access pipeline demonstrates the way colonial violence must be continually deployed to secure the transit of oil from the Bakken to St. James. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie between the United States government and the

Great Sioux Nation was a document established under conditions of military occupation and genocidal intent. The legitimacy of the United States government in such a treaty is at base its ability to marshal violence. Nevertheless, the treaty between two nations included territorial sovereignty for the Sioux that extended well into what would be “legally” known in 2016 as

Army Corps land. A variety of unilateral maneuvers by the United States (Indian Appropriations

Act, Dawes Act, Indian Reorganization Act, Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Plan) eroded the territory and sovereignty of the Sioux and violated the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. In approving the DAPL permit, the Army Corps was empowered by Section 10 and Section 408 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 granting jurisdiction over waterways of the United States to the Corps and authorizing the Corps to permit modifications to flood control and navigation infrastructure.

In addition, Section 404 of the Clean Water Act makes the Army Corps the main environmental Harmon 86 regulatory body responsible for conducting the Environmental Assessment for projects like

DAPL that interact with major waterways or wetlands: in July of 2016, the Corps released a final

Environmental Assessment finding “no significant impact” and green lighting the project.205 By

2016, following Warren’s work in the 19th century and Pick-Sloan in the 20th century, the Army

Corps of Engineers had a legally inscribed right to decide how to manage the Missouri River in

Standing Rock Sioux territory.

205 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: “Environmental assessment: Dakota Access Pipeline Project, crossings of flowage easements and federal lands.” July 25th 2016. https://cdm16021.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16021coll7/id/2801 Harmon 87

(Fig. 7)206

206 Hoover, Elsa. October 2016. Available on “NYC #StandingRockSyllabus” https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/ Accessed January 2018. Harmon 88

Much discussion circulated around whether Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) had sufficiently engaged in the requisite community consultation process. ETP also used a regulatory loophole by classifying Dakota Access as many small pipelines as opposed to a thousand-mile- long conduit, thereby bypassing the need for a full Environmental Impact Statement. However, contesting the illegality of ETP’s actions on these terms still legitimizes the entire regulatory process under which the Army Corps of Engineers can grant a drilling permit instead of the

Standing Rock Sioux themselves. The legitimacy of such a process is based only on a history of colonialism, and the specific ways in which the Army Corps dispossessed the Sioux of land through the justification of flood control, irrigation and energy production.

Since 1824, the Army Corps has answered to the task of engineering a river system designed for industry and securing national security: “For more than seventy years the Corps has had the only legal authority for checking pollution in our rivers, and has done absolutely nothing about it.”207 Secretary Ickes in 1951 explained the Corps this way: “One way to describe the

Corps of Army Engineers is to say that it is the most powerful and most pervasive lobby in

Washington. The aristocrats who compose it are our highest ruling class.”208 In the 1970’s, as the

Environmental Protection Agency began to take over aspects of environmental regulation, the

Army Corps retained more power than is well understood.209 For most projects with impacts related to US waterways and wetlands, the Army Corps of Engineers has the greatest hand in shaping the physical infrastructures of this country. According to Dr. Beverly Wright,

Here in this State [Louisiana], Native lands aren’t even behind the levees. So we’ve had the first environmental refugees to be relocated in this state. Native Americans, the

207 Morgan, Arthur E. Dams and Other Disasters. Porter Sargent Publisher, 1971. The Army corps was supposed to regulate river pollution beginning in 1899 under the Refuse Act. 208 Harold Ickes, Forward to Muddy Waters by Arthur Maass, Harvard University press, Cambridge, Mass., 1951, pg. ix. 209 See Section 404 Permitting under the Clean Water Act. Army Corps retains powers of permitting and enforcement. https://www.epa.gov/cwa-404/section-404-permit-program Harmon 89

Houma Indians, their land was not even protected by the levee, so there was no way for them to ever have any safety. And that’s true all over the country. Native Americans are not afforded the protection that others of us are afforded—whatever little it is—Native Americans don’t have it.210

The conflict of interest surrounding Army Corps environmental permitting for fossil fuel infrastructure is glaring. The Army Corps has both a congressional mandate and an institutional history of engineering a river system designed for commerce and national security. Fossil fuel and petrochemical operations along the Mississippi have been declared National Security Critical

Infrastructure, and control over fossil fuels is understood as a geopolitical imperative for the

United States. A division of the US military, the Army Corps finds itself in the bizarre position of weighing the commercial and national security value of fossil fuel operations against claims of environmental damage. In terms of ongoing land dispossession of indigenous peoples and ecological devastation, it is only too clear how the Army Corp tends to issue its permits—a legacy beginning in the 19th century.

This is by no means a definitive contextualization of the recent colonial violence in

Standing Rock, but rather an attempt to show the physical infrastructures and larger projects of settler colonialism linking Standing Rock to Cancer Alley—the way that anti-indigenous and anti-black violence are still connected by plantation geographies.

The policies of the Army Corps of Engineers regarding environmental protection and regulation point to the capitalist and settler logics that structure the continued dispossession under the fossil fuel/petrochem/agribusiness economy. In working with industry along the various rivers of the United States, the Army Corps utilizes a tool called “compensatory mitigation.”211 In exchange for an Army Corps permit granting an entity the right to adversely

210 Dr. Beverly Wright (Deep South Center for Environmental Justice), Interviewed by Max Harmon and Brad Geismar, Dillard University, October 2016. 211 U.S Environmental Protection Agency. Compensatory Mitigation Factsheet: From EPA.gov. Harmon 90 impact streams, wetlands, rivers, and other aquatic resources, that entity must elsewhere offset the damage they have done. They can do this through implementing a restoration project themselves, or by purchasing “credits” from a mitigation bank:

A mitigation bank is a wetland, stream or other aquatic resource area that has been restored, created, enhanced, or, in certain circumstances, preserved. This resource area is then set aside to compensate for future conversions of aquatic resources for development activities. The value of a bank is determined by quantifying the aquatic resource functions restored or created in terms of ‘credits.’ Permittees, upon approval of regulatory agencies, can acquire these credits to meet their requirements for compensatory mitigation.212

Under the environmental logic of the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for granting Energy

Transfer Partners the permitting for the Dakota Access Pipeline, drastic ecological damage can be “offset” through a restoration project in a completely different location. In a perfect example of Tsing’s “plantation ecology,” the Army Corps allows industry to “kill off beings that are not recognized as assets,” through a “beneficial” project that may or may not have any ecological relevance to the place being damaged. For the Army Corps, ecological systems and the particularity of places are reduced to quantifiable “aquatic resource functions” that can be weighed across time and distance. The webs of connection between humans and non-humans that make up a particular ecology are quantitatively disappeared under a completely flattened conception of space. There is no difference between here and there. Damage here is offset by restoration there. The Army Corps has manufactured a zero-sum ecology of cost/benefit in which capital always wins. Under the logic of the Army Corps, the lives of the Standing Rock Sioux in

1944 and 2016 were replaced by some restoration or preservation project somewhere else.

Mitigation credits trade on the same logic as Indian removal, in which all of the economic, cultural, ecological particularity of a place can be justifiably destroyed with the

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-08/documents/compensatory_mitigation_factsheet.pdf 212 ibid. Harmon 91 promise of new “Indian territory.” A capitalist and settler relationship to land underlies the Army

Corps’ environmental regulation, in which places are converted into quantifiable units and represented as commodities to be exchanged, as sites through which value might be extracted.

Such a relationship to land also supports community buyouts and the dispossession of African-

Americans—where the market price is supposed to stand-in for the social and spatial fabric of a place; where people and communities can be destroyed in the language of corporate environmental responsibility.

Spatial Reach and Critical Infrastructure

In his history of the antebellum Mississippi River economy, Walter Johnson discusses the ways that Southern plantation owners saw imperialism and the geographic extension of the plantation as a “fix” for an otherwise faltering institution.213 With the foreclosure of a western expansion of “slave states,” laws forbidding further slave importation, and a loss of trade expansion, Planters saw the control of places like Cuba and Nicaragua as the necessary extension of the U.S. Plantation in the 19th century. While Johnson’s history provides a crucial intertwining of imperial and capitalist projects, he concludes with the notion that Southern planters did not get what they wanted. While this is strictly true, in that the regime of chattel slavery ended and the antebellum plantation did not extend, it is crucial to see the ways that the contemporary economy along the Mississippi River has reinvigorated the North/South axis of the plantation along lines similar to the hopes of Southern whites in the 19th century. Indeed, fossil fuel and agribusiness corporations have attempted to assert control over land in the “global south,” extending spatial

213 Johnson, Walter; “The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny,” from River of Dark Dreams. Harmon 92 strategies of plantation domination beyond the confines of the United States.214

In 1974, then U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz declared, “food is a tool. It is a weapon in the U.S. negotiating kit.” U.S. agricultural policy was set up to create a farming and river system capable of generating massive amounts of commodity crops and pushing them onto the world market. While U.S. agriculture was (and is) subsidized in a variety of ways, foreign countries were forced to lower tariffs on imported goods via U.S. backed “economic restructuring” packages by the IMF and World Bank.215 While the domestic food market was not one in which profits could be realized, a spatial expansion of U.S. agricultural commodities could be a spatial fix for agribusiness. The Mississippi River would be the conduit through which grain passed from the Midwest onto the ocean vessels and the global market (also packaged as food “aid”)—substantially increasing foreign dependency on food imports and destroying local agricultural economies. In addition, U.S. based agribusiness corporations began acquiring land and infrastructure in the global south to extend their regime of land ownership and an exploitable labor supply. The antebellum Three Oaks plantation, just south of New Orleans, was purchased by Domino Sugar in 1909. While some of the sugar still comes from the surrounding region, the majority of the sugar is now grown and harvested in countries of the global south such as

Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.216 Sugar planters in the 19th century hoped to be able to expand their plantations to Cuba—today, sugar for Mississippi River operations comes directly from African labor.

The Army Corps of Engineers has operated globally since the 1950’s, with very little

214 In the 1990’s, Margie Richards, a lead activist from Diamond visited Nigeria and collected water samples from Shell’s violent operations on Ogoni land, which she presented to an international assembly in an attempt to draw comparisons between Shell’s culpability in Louisiana and Nigeria. See Lerner and Bullard, pg. 93; 215 Harvey, David. "Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610 (2007): 22-44 216 Dinsmore, Christopher. “Baltimore's Domino refinery to receive largest sugar shipment ever.” The Baltimore Sun. October 19th, 2017. Harmon 93 public attention, in places of strategic value to the US. In Vietnam, the Army Corps assisted US troops on a variety of levels, introducing “the Rome plow, a military tractor equipped with a protective cab and a special tree-cutting blade.”217 Just as the forested plantation periphery was an unsteady landscape of Planter control, so too was deforestation a primary weapon against the

North Vietnamese: “Engineer troops constructed 900 miles of modern, paved highways connecting the major population centers of the Republic of Vietnam and monitored the construction by private American contractors of an additional 550 miles of Vietnamese highways

(my emphasis).”218 The “modernity” of the roads is the implicit justification for intervention— the redemption of an unlivable pre-modern space:

Since the 1950s, the Corps has engaged in major engineering studies and projects in many countries. The projects included roads in Afghanistan, Iran, and other mid eastern countries; and, pursuant to the Camp David accords, the Israeli air force bases in Ovda and Ramon. Surveys dealt with transportation networks and entire public works programs. From 1959 to 1964, Army engineers examined port and highway projects and built airports, highway systems, and ports in eight countries: Afghanistan, Burma, British Guiana, Iran, Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Somali Republic.219

These infrastructure projects often involve the violent replacement of “pre-modern landscapes” with “modern” infrastructures, and translate into capital accumulation for US corporations and an improved U.S. geopolitical position. The Army Corps contracts out many of its infrastructure projects to U.S. corporations; there is private money being made in the building of roads, airports, and military bases across the world. While infrastructures in Iraq, Israel and Saudi

Arabia are far from the Mississippi River, they still fall under the Army Corps’ directive toward

217 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “A Brief History: Combat and Military Construction.” http://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Brief-History-of-the-Corps/Combat-and-Military-Construction/ Accessed March 26, 2018. 218 Ibid. 219 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “Brief History: Responding to New Needs.” http://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Brief-History-of-the-Corps/Responding-to-New-Needs/ Accessed March 26, 2018 Harmon 94 projects “of national importance, in a commercial or military point of view.”220 Though far away from the Mississippi, these infrastructure projects reflect the importance of global flows of oil, as corporations along the River are deeply connected to Mideast fossil fuel. The Army Corps operates on both the Tigris and the Mississippi, and in both locations serves to support the strategic position of the US government and the corporate elite of the neo-plantation.221

In addition to global fossil fuel, US national security discourses connect the Army Corps’ middle east operations to their work on the Mississippi. Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, fossil fuel and petrochemical infrastructure along the Mississippi (and elsewhere) was declared to be national security “Critical Infrastructure” under the Public Health Security and

Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-188) and the Maritime

Transportation Security Act (MTSA, P.L. 107-295).222 Given the fact that a strike to many of the facilities would be incredibly damaging, and disproportionately so to African-Americans who live adjacent to facilities, such a measure might genuinely reflect an inclusive interest in protection. However, one of the outcomes of the “critical infrastructure” designation along with various changes to EPA regulation during the Bush administration has been a decreased ability for the public to access data about the composition of chemical plants and their outputs:

In December 2006, the EPA announced final rules that would undermine the TRI (Toxic Release Inventory) program by eliminating detailed reports from more than five thousand facilities that release up to two thousand pounds of chemicals every year and eliminating detailed reports from nearly two thousand facilities that manage up to five hundred pounds of chemicals known to pose some of the worst threats to human health.223

Instead of fossil fuel and chemical corporations altering production practices that put nearby

220 Ibid. 221 Benoit, Rick. “Diving in a War Zone: How USACE and other Personnel Handled Underwater Work at Mosul Dam,” Hydro Review, January 1st 2018. 222 Bullard, Robert D., and Beverly Wright. "Separate and Unequal Treatment: Response to Health Emergencies, Human Experiments and Bioterrorism Threats." In The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities, NYU Press, 2012, pg. 203 223 ibid, 205 Harmon 95 residents in danger, the specter of the terrorist strike has actually allowed industry to retreat further from the public eye.

In 1988, when a massive explosion rocked the town of Diamond adjacent to a Shell

Refinery, one resident, Larry Brown recalls, “I actually thought it was a nuclear bomb that had hit our area…that we were being invaded by another country.”224 Instead, it was one of many instances of Plantation production knowingly resting its operation on the health of communities of color. The Shell refinery explosion and all of its toxic releases cannot be considered accidents, but rather inevitable occurrences within the logic of its operation. Facilities along the

Mississippi, which daily emit toxins to neighbors, are literally patrolled and protected by local and state law enforcement as well as the Department of Homeland Security. Who is being protected, and from what? Utilizing the discourse of national security, Industry and the Federal

Government continue to perpetuate conditions that render predominately African-American communities radically insecure: “To date, there has never been a terrorist attack on a U.S. chemical facility. However, there have been more than three thousand accidents involving more than ten thousand pounds of hazardous materials since 1987, with smaller incidents occurring daily.”225 Capitalist profit along the Mississippi from a production process that causes unambiguous violence to predominately African-American communities is justified by the threat of external attack, which in turn justifies further interventionist policy.

In reaction to the Standing Rock Sioux’s powerful effort in contesting Energy Transfer

Partners’ Dakota Access Pipeline, a new piece of legislation has been introduced in several state governments. In 2017, Oklahoma, a state with its own history of indigenous and fossil fuel conflicts, passed HB 1123 and HB 2128. These bills protect “critical infrastructure” by creating

224 Lerner and Bullard, pg. 32 225 Bullard and Wright, "Separate and Unequal Treatment: Response to Health Emergencies, Human Experiments and Bioterrorism Threats." 202 Harmon 96 new penalties for anyone who can be shown to have an intent to disrupt the operation of such

“critical infrastructure facilities,” including oil and gas operations, chemical plants, and pipelines. Felony charges for conspiracy to disrupt critical infrastructure are up to ten years in prison and a $100,000 fine.226 The Oklahoma bills have been turned into a model bill by the

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), well known for creating and championing legislation supporting private prisons: their bill is called the Critical Infrastructure Protection

Act. The bill is making its way through Wyoming, Iowa and Ohio. Wyoming Senator Leland

Christenson introduced the bill by claiming that these kinds of measures are necessary to disrupt

“organizations that sponsor this kind of ecoterrorism.”227 Of course, such language appeals to a notion of national security that necessarily produces profound insecurity for those who daily experience the violence of “critical infrastructure.”

Flooding, Green-Zoning and Corporate Responsibility

On August 29th 2005, seventy-eight years after the Army Corps began its Master plan for flood control, a levee broke above the lower ninth ward of New Orleans. The profoundly racialized outcome of Hurricane Katrina (some contend that the levee was blown up as it was in

1927 to sacrifice poor blacks for affluent whites) was the result of the last two hundred years of racialized river control and plantation production. Human agency in the aftermath of Katrina was largely denied: as congressman Richard Baker put it at the time, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it. But God did.”228 The destruction of public housing

226 Oklahoma House of Representatives, H.B. 1123, 2017 (enacted). http://webserver1.lsb.state.ok.us/cf_pdf/2017- 18%20ENGR/hB/HB1123%20ENGR.PDF I learned about these critical infrastructure bills from Oglala Lakota and Absentee Shawnee activist Ashley Nicole McCray at the CLPP Conference on April 14th, 2018. 227 Horn, Steve. “Wyoming Now Third State to Propose ALEC Bill Cracking Down on Pipeline Protests.” DESMOG, February 21, 2018 228 Saulny, Susan, “Clamoring to Come Home to New Orleans Projects,” The New York Times, June 6th 2006. Harmon 97 in New Orleans and the mass displacement of African-Americans who disproportionately used public housing were portrayed as processes driven by non-human agency. As the flooding displaced majority people of color communities, city planners and real-estate speculators drew up a plan for New Orleans that would further consolidate white ownership and black dispossession:

The situation in New Orleans is what I call extreme disaster capitalism. After Katrina, all of the these people descended upon the community, looking at it as an opportunity, and also looking at the city as a blank slate…From all over the world they descended upon us, and began drawing up plans without our input. And so came into play the famous “green dot map.” It was a map of the city that they drew, creating swaths of land that would become green space. And those spaces were right, slap-dab in the middle of African American communities…We were being wiped off the map.229

Although a variety of groups successfully fought the map and its associated material changes, many African-Americans were unable to return after the storm, and those that did are less likely to have stable employment than before.230 The human agency that was largely cited in Katrina was negligence on the part of the Army Corps for building faulty protections, and failure by

FEMA for haphazard, hazardous, and racially biased relief efforts.

However, while these criticisms were crucially important, they also implicitly maintain the “normal” geography of flood protection, the normal geography of capital, the normal geography of white supremacy. The “exceptional” circumstances of Katrina, those directly produced by the contemporary Plantation, were then used by the government, under the Stafford

Act, to allow for a bypass of typical zoning procedures to re-open landfills and other hazardous sites in the backyards of African-American communities.231 “Unlike a lot of people, I believe that this was planned,” argues Dr. Beverly Wright:

229 Interview with Dr. Beverly Wright, October 2016. 230 Casselman, Ben, “Katrina Washed Away New Orleans’s Black Middle Class.” August 24th 2015. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/katrina-washed-away-new-orleanss-black-middle-class/ 231 Interview with Dr. Beverly Wright, October 2016 Harmon 98

I don’t believe that this was serendipity—that this just happened because of the hurricane. I think that people had some serious plans they were working on to whiten New Orleans, to move poor people out, and to make certain that thousands of African-Americans were unable to return to the city. We have seen evidence of that, not just in what has happened, but in written comments that politicians made, and some of the things we saw developers doing. We know for certain it was never their intent for black people to return to the city.232

After Katrina, the Army Corps was sent back to work reclaiming the “normal” geography of the alluvial valley—a necropolitical grid of racial management.

The Valley of the Giant is a geography that naturalizes white agency, degrades black and indigenous agency, and selectively demotes and uplifts the agency of non-human actors. In response to the charge of environmental racism, industries have moved toward community buyouts and relocations and done so in the name of “green buffer zones.” The Shell Norco

Manufacturing Complex (along with most major corporations operating along the lower

Mississippi) has an entire web page and personnel devoted to “the community and the region, supporting education, environmental, safety and health programs.”233 Shell is committed to articulating a normal geography of production in which workers, neighbors, and even the environment, are made better through its operation.

In response to industrial accidents that can no longer be covered up, corporations present themselves as the most capable agent in fixing a problem for which they admit only partial responsibility. Marylee Orr received calls from impacted families after the 2010 British

Petroleum (BP) Gulf spill:

A wife who says her husband is having a seizure on the floor, a guy who’s telling me the toilet bowl is completely filled with blood, people vomiting blood, people who are losing their memory… It’s really an unknown, there’s not a lot of studies or literature about people’s exposure to the dispersant and the oil…If you considered it a crime scene…I

232 ibid. 233 Shell Norco, Community Commitment; https://www.shell.us/about-us/projects-and-locations/norco- manufacturing-complex/community-commitment.html Accessed March 26, 2018. Harmon 99

would want to get rid of the evidence [too], because you can’t figure out how much oil there is if you’re dispersing it all to the bottom.234

A few years after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, the largest oil spill of all time, which immediately killed eleven people, BP claimed:

The results are evident. The Gulf Coast economy has rapidly rebounded, with numerous tourism records being broken every year since the spill. Extensive scientific data collected and analyzed over the past five years show that the impact to the environment was of short duration and limited in geography, and BP has seen no data that suggest significant long-term population-level impacts on any Gulf species. As a result, the science points to the Gulf recovering more quickly than anticipated.235

As David Bond has argued, industry has already successfully coopted the language of environmentalism and is similarly integrating charges of “environmental racism” into its own operation. It positions itself as partially accountable and responsible while also asserting its ability to transform the landscape into something even better than it was before extraction, daily emissions, spills, etc:

the official response to disasters like the BP Oil Spill cultivates a fixed understanding of normal life. This instigated normality both works to define the extent of the disaster and offers itself as a platform of sorts for subsequent scientific, political, and ethical projects (without, in either case, becoming an object of much scrutiny). In more ways than one, the last disaster becomes the new governing norm.236

Without the plantation genealogy to contextualize industrial dispossession, sickness, and land- loss for marginalized communities, corporations can continue to produce the Valley of the Giant, a geography that naturalizes and normalizes the violence they perpetrate.

234 Interview with Marylee Orr, October 2016. The compounding toxicity impacts of Corexit (the dispersant used by BP) is not well understood, and long-term health impacts on locals and disaster responders is also unknown. As with so many industrial cases, it is incredibly hard to isolate a single variable in health outcomes—industry benefits from the diverse ecological systems in which they are embedded to deny causality. One study of Corexit found compounding toxicity in relation to crude oil: Hemmer, M. J., Barron, M. G. and Greene, R. M. (2011), Comparative toxicity of eight oil dispersants, Louisiana sweet crude oil (LSC), and chemically dispersed LSC to two aquatic test species. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 30: 2244-2252 235 BP Website: Commitment to the Gulf of Mexico: http://www.bp.com/en_us/bp-us/commitment-to-the-gulf-of- mexico/gulf-mexico-restoration.html Accessed June 2016. This link no longer works. They’ve changed their language since 2016. 236 Bond, David, “Governing Disaster: The Political Life of the Environment during the BP Oil Spill,” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 28, Issue 4, 2013 pg. 707. Harmon 100

Along the Chemical Corridor, State and corporate entities continually disavow agency in the current spatial arrangements that produce white corporate profit and black and indigenous sickness, poverty and death. The web of ecological connectivity that actually underlies industrial operations (and the plantation from the beginning) is disavowed in order to sever the material connections between agribusiness and diabetes, pollution and dispossession. As grain commodity move down the river, communities along the banks have almost no access to food. Growing food is often no longer an option as soil toxicity is too great. Although many people still fish in the

Mississippi, the bio-accumulation of toxic chemicals blurs the line between food and poison.

Cancer, heart disease, diabetes and asthma have become normal. The normal geography of the

Mississippi River is a constellation of relationships between corporate executives, residents of the corridor, water, benzene, fish, anhydrous ammonia, oil, congressman, pipelines, the Standing

Rock Sioux, wetlands, hurricanes. Much like the Sonora desert, which Jason de León argues has been operationalized in the service of violent US border control, the Mississippi River and all of its non-human constituent parts has been engineered to distribute capital, commodities, floods, and toxins in ways that reify white supremacist and colonial relations.237 The conditions along the alluvial valley become identical with the landscape as an inert and given condition, nothing more than the flow of the river, down from the Rockies and the Alleghenies. The sickness of people along the river is portrayed as individual or cultural pathology—people who eat too much and don’t exercise, people who smoke and drink. This part of the River is “naturally” uninhabitable, it is a toxic landscape reified by the economic necessity of fossil fuel and petrochemical production: it can only be redeemed by buffer zones and by moving people out.

Those who die along the corridor, and it is all too normal to die along the corridor, are given

237 De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Vol. 36. University of California Press, 2015. Pg. 68 Harmon 101 autopsies that deny this plantation genealogy. Pastor Harry Joseph of St. James Parish says “he has buried five residents in the past six months, all victims of cancer.”238

(fig. 8)239

(fig. 9)240

238 Zanolli, Lauren; “’Caner Ally’ residents say industry is hurting town: ‘We’re collateral damage.’” The Guardian, June 6th 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/06/louisiana-cancer-alley-st-james-industry- environment Accessed February 20th 2018. 239 Hilliard, Sam Bowers. Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture. Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Pg. 34 Harmon 102

(fig. 10)241

(fig. 11)242

240 Paradise, Tom and Fiona Davidson. “Landscape, Environment, and Geography of the Mississippi Delta Region,” in Defining the Delta, University of Arkansas Press, 2015. Pg. 81. All figures by Tom Paradise. 241 Ibid, 79 242 ibid, 77 Harmon 103

www

Understanding the Plantation as persistently condemning and redeeming geographies necessitates thinking about the relationship between incarceration and foreclosures, redlining and greenzoning, flooding and pollution. These are technologies of dispossession that are inextricable from the restless movement of capital, from the structural need to empty places of value, only to reclaim and rebuild them. It is this reclaiming and rebuilding that becomes the materialization of a discourse of progress. Once a fenceline community, now a landscaped buffer zone. Once an urban ghetto, now a trendy apartment complex. Once a laboring slave, now a white man on a tractor. These are all naturalized landscapes that hide the violence of displacement (and death), and the new zones of uninhabitability created by the space of progress.

These geographies are a congealed history: a history of Indian removal and pipelines, a history of slavery and plantations and plants. But all that is embedded in their physical form betrays the contingency of their “natural” appearance. Hegemonic landscapes are in fact profoundly unsteady, and it requires a great amount of effort to make them appear stable and natural: “’every hill and molehill,’ every blade of grass, every flutter of the flag, and every note that is played must be contested.”243

243 Woods, 290 Harmon 104

Conclusion: Right to the River

L’eau Est La Vie camp is a floating pipeline resistance camp. Although we have no leaders, we value the voices of our indigenous, black, femme, and two spirit organizers. We fight in the bayous of Louisiana, Chata Houma Chitimacha Atakapaw territory, to stop the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, an Energy Transfer Partners project and the tail end of the Dakota Access Pipeline. ~Statement of purpose from L’eau-Est La Vie encampment (2018)

The dense web of connections that constitutes the Plantation is both its strength and its weakness. As we have seen, the Plantation is a way of organizing space, of controlling ecologies, of ordering the world around white supremacist accumulation. The Plantation reproduces by constructing uninhabitable geographies, which in turn obscure its violence by displacing agency onto ecological systems. The historical relationship between the control of the River and control of black labor lends a material potency to white supremacy—a River seeming to magically reproduce white power by distributing toxins here and profits there. Contemporary indigenous dispossession via fossil fuel extraction and transportation is materially linked by flows of capital and commodity to sites of environmental racism on old plantations of the alluvial valley. The destruction of topsoil and biodiversity, the expansion of corporate control over land, food, and water are all linked to the persistent material infrastructures of settler colonialism and chattel slavery. But while the interconnectivity of the Plantation lends it flexibility and a “built-in capacity to maintain itself,” it also leaves it vulnerable.244

Even after trillions of dollars and a century of US military intervention, the Mississippi does not flow in a straight line. The water swirls, and the river meanders. Despite the 1919 assertion of Planters that the river had been “definitely conquered,” (The Great Flood came eight years later) and Colonel Dale F. Means’ 1986 decree that the “lower Mississippi River is a giant in shackles” (there was a large flood in 1993), the agency of the Mississippi has not been

244 Beckford, George. “Agriculture Organization and Planning in Cuba,” in The George Beckford Papers. Canoe Press, University of the West Indies, 2000. 46. Harmon 105 controlled or reduced to laws of hydrology. In 2017, the Army Corps of Engineers spent over

$220 million securing the Mississippi.245 In 2011, the Mississippi experienced massive floods that stressed the flood control infrastructure and killed twenty people. Thousands of homes were inundated. In 2012, a drought forced the Army Corps to increase its dredging of the river, making the channel deeper. According to John Carlin, 40-year towboat pilot working out of

Hannibal, Mo., “It [The Mississippi] doesn’t behave like it used to, seems like it doesn’t take much to get out of control.”246 According to the 2018 report, “In the past seven years, the

Mississippi River Valley has been hit with 100-, 200- and 500-year floods — ones that had a 1 percent or less chance of happening in each timespan — that caused damages of more than $50 billion. Disasters along the river “have become persistent and systemic,” noted a group representing 75 cities from 10 states in a report last year.”247 With a flood control mechanism

(perhaps only barely functioning) designed to save critical infrastructure and cities like New

Orleans, the internal contradiction is that the very same flood control system is massively contributing to coastal erosion.

The river engineered to be hospitable to industry is depriving the coast of sediment and has allowed fossil fuel corporations to completely destroy coastal wetlands, leading to almost incomprehensible land loss—a football field area of land gone every hour.248 The Biloxi-

Chitamacha-Choctaw people of Isle de Jean Charles have been called the first “climate refugees”

245 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; “President's Fiscal 2017 Budget for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works released.” http://www.usace.army.mil/Media/News-Releases/News-Release-Article- View/Article/652668/presidents-fiscal-2017-budget-for-us-army-corps-of-engineers-civil-works-releas/ Accessed March 26, 2018. 246 Frankel, Todd C. “Taming the Mighty Mississippi,” The Washington Post, March 14th 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/mississippi-river- infrastructure/?utm_term=.814cd2c6bc46 Accessed March 27, 2018 247 ibid. 248 Marshall, Bob. “Losing Ground.” ProPublica. August 28th 2014. Harmon 106 in the United States as the ocean rises up over their land.249 But when we consider that it was the policy of Indian Removal that pushed them there to begin with, and the impact of fossil fuel infrastructure causing land loss now, it seems like “America’s first climate refugee” might be the wrong term. It might be more accurate to call them “the U.S.’s original plantation refugee:” displaced in the 19th century by the expanding settler plantation, and again in the 21st century by the new settler plantation of fossil fuel.

The fundamental contradictions of Army Corps flood control persist. In trying to stop

New Orleans from flooding, the Army Corps is condemning the rest of Louisiana to drowning in a rising ocean and eroding land. The Mississippi is an unstable landscape, and it requires massive resources to hold everything together. As the history of the plantation shows, strategies of domination are never totalizing, and both humans and non-humans have tremendous power to imagine and enact alternatives: the cracks in the levee are beginning to show.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, local people and community organizations began frantically delivering supplies to those hardest hit. In most cases, small groups were first responders to the poorest communities, with the government far behind. People loaded barges with supplies and sent them down the river to New Orleans. While of course Hurricane Katrina is a story of the reconsolidation of capital and white supremacy following a disaster caused by the Plantation regime250 (via climate change, levee breaches in poor communities, etc.), the movement of barges down the Mississippi loaded with goods to meet peoples’ needs suggests the already present possibility of a different world. The barging of supplies down the river was an act of spatial claiming, an assertion that this river and its existing infrastructure cannot continue

249 Davenport, Coral and Robertson Campbell. “Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees.” The New York Times. May 3rd, 2016. 250 Gunewardena, Nandini, and Mark Schuller, eds. Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction. Rowman Altamira, 2008. Harmon 107 to deny human need. It showed, if only for a moment, the possibility of a river economy oriented around feeding and healing.

It is only too clear how successful the Plantation has been at reconsolidating after floods, after moments in which it becomes very clear that river agency cannot be wholly reduced to discernable laws, that there is still something that threatens the control project. Climate change has and will increase these instances, and unsettle the landscape further. It is a certainty that capital will be waiting for the unsettling of physical infrastructures, and for the displacement of people. But it is my hope that people can get there first. Normal geographies of US capitalism exist on the supposedly absent agency of non-humans, and the degraded agency of marginalized people—on reducing the agency of the river to laws that are discernable and therefore controllable by humans. Many slave masters practiced human control as a science, deploying various technologies of domination to yield more cotton, and higher profits.251 Whiteness was in part about a claim to managerial expertise, and the reduction of the complex agency of rivers and other human beings into hydrological and racial knowledges.252 The Plantation was supposed to be a totalizing geography, in which the river stayed behind its banks, and slaves stayed within the gridiron. But plantation control was never total or complete—people slipped out through the forests and swamps, aboard steamboats and across the water. As soon as the levees were built, they needed to be built higher. It was out of the very Plantation geographies of domination that people formed subjectivities, communities, and resistance practices both oppositional and excessive to the logic of the Plantation.253

251 Rosenthal, Caitlin; “Slavery’s Scientific Management,” in Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 252 Roediger, David R., and Elizabeth D. Esch. The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in US History. Oxford University Press, 2012. 253 Mckittrick Demonic Grounds. Angela Davis “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role.” Sylvia Wynter “Plot and Plantation.” Hartman, Saidiya. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” Souls 18:1 (2016): 166-173 Harmon 108

I have tried to show how plantation geographies rely upon the ability to produce and reproduce uninhabitability—to create uneven space across which capital can flow and to naturalize violence. The breaks in this apparently smooth process are the plantation’s weak points—the moments in which power’s claim to land can only be made through brute force and the unambiguous legacy of chattel slavery and Indian removal. But these structural openings can only get us so far, and are always occasioned by the agency of people fighting and surviving.

I want to briefly point to the necessary complement to my work, which is the incredibly powerful history of those who have died, survived, contested, and made alternative meanings out of the hegemonic geography I have described as the Valley of the Giant. The following counter- genealogy is hardly complete. Nevertheless, it is a starting point to the ongoing building of social and political alternatives to the Plantation. McKittrick points to the ways in which “black geographies” are not only sites of subjugation, forced labor, pollution, etc, but are also “new analytic ground that puts forth a knowledge system produced outside the realms of normalcy, thus rejecting the very rules of the system that profits from racial violence.”254 This is not to objectify marginalized people as figures of “abstract potentiality,” but rather as historical

“subjects of emancipation,” who have contested and impacted the Plantation regime from its beginning.255 This genealogy includes indigenous and African maroons, insurrectionists, and those just trying to survive. It includes the “Blues” (formerly enslaved people who fought and died in the civil war and oversaw African-American gains during reconstruction), the Blues tradition (musical, epistemological256) the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm Cooperatives, The Republic of New Africa, the communities of Diamond,

254 McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 11 255 The distinction between “figures of abstract potentiality” and “subjects of emancipation” is from: Marasco, Robyn; “Already the Effect of the Whip”: Critical Theory and the Feminine Ideal. differences 1 May 2006; 17 (1): 89 256 See Woods, “The Blues Tradition of Explanation” in Development Arrested. Pg. 29 Harmon 109

Lions, Mossville, Revielltown, Morrisonville, and so many others. It includes the contemporary work of Cooperation Jackson, and the ongoing fight of indigenous land and water protectors in

Louisiana, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and across the world. People are continuing to build collective capacity to remake geographies and societies. Their work is a continuation of the work that has been done in various forms since the beginning of the Plantation itself—building power through connection to land, water, and people, unsettling the infrastructures and legitimacy of domination, and imagining and enacting a different world.

When the Shell refinery in Norco, LA goes under water, who will decide if another one will be built? When Houston and Baton Rouge rebuild again after more years of floods, how will they be built? For whom, and by whom? There is an opportunity to rebuild the physical infrastructures of our world so that the Plantation might actually be a geographic formation relegated to the past. Of course, these kinds of oppositional land claims and alternative territorial systems will be met by force. The only question is how many people will be ready to meet it: as

Fannie Lou Hamer said, “If survival is the name of the game, then men and governments must not move just to postpone violent confrontation, but seek ways and means of channeling legitimate discontent into creative and progressive action for change.”257

“Mni Wiconi,” or its English translation, “Water is Life,” emerged as the rallying cry of the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline.258 When taken seriously, “Water is Life” fundamentally unsettles the Plantation. It is an ontological counter to one of the central premises of the Plantation: namely, that water can be owned, and that it can be reduced to industrial input, toxic outflow, and commodity conduit. In the regulatory system of the Plantation, water flows

257 Hamer, Fannie Lou."’If the Name of the Game Is Survive, Survive,”: Speech Delivered in Ruleville, Mississippi, September 27, 1971." In The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, edited by Brooks Maegan Parker and Houck Davis W., University Press of Mississippi, 2011. 140-44. Cited in Woods, 218. 258 While “Water is Life” was certainly the populized translation, I’ve heard people suggest that “Water as Life” is also accurate. Harmon 110 can be purchased, and can be contaminated if the damage is elsewhere offset. “Water is life,” suggests an entirely different relation, in which human community is oriented around water as a life-giving entity, as opposed to instrumentalizing water for the profit of some. It is not merely a plea against pollution, but a claim against the property regimes and government entities that have sought to weaponize water against the Standing Rock Sioux and other communities.259

The tactics of water protectors also tore down the normal geography of settler land claims. Water protectors asserted a claim to space—the encampment forced a confrontation that discloses the reality underlying property rights—brute force. The normalcy of the geography of pipelines and Army Corps permitting was for a moment undone—the Dakota Access Pipeline was not simply a line on a map, but a profoundly violent installation onto the land that necessitated the deployment of local and state police, the national guard, and the FBI. The assertion that “water is life” ultimately required the full-strength of the State to forcefully remind everyone that in a normal geography, water is not life.

Mni Wiconi is a decolonial politics that sought to sever the ongoing material linkages between capitalist accumulation and the destruction of indigenous land, water, and sovereignty.

At both the headwaters and mouth of the Mississippi, indigenous-led pipeline struggles against the Line 3 Pipeline and the Bayou Bridge Pipeline are an ongoing testament to Plantation resistance. The Bayou Bridge resistance camp, L’eau-Est La Vie, continues to challenge the normal geography of corporate land ownership and Army Corps’ permitting—they are calling upon territorial claims outside U.S. property regimes to assert their right to land and water.

The infrastructure of the Mississippi River has fixed in place antebellum relations of domination. The waters that come down from a thousand hillsides flow past Standing Rock and

259 Seen especially clearly in the Pick-Sloan Dams and on the night of Nov. 20th, 2016 in Standing Rock when police sprayed water protectors with water cannons in sub-freezing temperatures. Also Flint, Michigan. Water contamination is common across the US. Harmon 111

Lake Oahe, and over a thousand pipelines. They flow past St. Paul, Ferguson, Baton Rouge, and the lower ninth ward of New Orleans—gracefully meandering the engineered banks of concrete and steel, past willow trees and refineries. The waters take the course of a violent history that has been carved out of the Valley. This will continue until a right to the city can be claimed, until a right to the river can be asserted. The deconstruction of white supremacy and settler colonialism must necessarily extend to the physical infrastructures that were produced by and constitutive of such projects. For people such as myself who are doing just fine in this normal geography, whose homes are built on the foundation of the Big House, who continue to benefit from the flows of commodity and capital moving up and down the Mississippi, a right to the river will not amount to an increase in power. Instead, a right to the river would constitute a loss of wealth, a loss of power, perhaps a loss of stability. But it would mean a reversal of the communal and cultural impoverishment inextricable from maintaining oppressive relations. If we are interested in the destruction of the Plantation, the Mississippi River itself must be remade and reimagined.

This leads directly to land reform, and also to ontological claims about what land and water are: “the lands, rivers, streams, air, plants, and animals of the region must be restored to their sacred status.”260 The invocation of the “sacred,” which I quote from Clyde Woods, does not point to an essentialized, indigenous relationship to the world. Although certainly attentive to indigenous notions of the sacred, Woods is actually centering an African-American “blues tradition” of relating to land, people, and non-human actors. I am not interested in trying to confine or render comprehensible any particular notion of the “sacred.” Instead, the sacred is an opening to the possible ways in which various people, communities, and traditions may have the capacity to live in relation to land and water—ways that contest and offer alternatives to the objectification so central to the last two hundred years of plantation “development.” Further, this

260 Woods, 290. Harmon 112 capacity does not come exclusively from reaching back to a time before the plantation, but rather through the experience of living and exceeding the plantation itself. The world is far more full and far less stable than Norman’s chart would have us believe. Army Corps maps show pipelines, but they do not show people. There is a collective agency beyond the comprehension of engineering rationality. There is a river challenging the constriction of the Plantation. There is a world ready to transform.

Harmon 113

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