Terra Nullius

Terra Nullius. Intaglio, Digital Print, Chine-Collé. 45cm x 45cm, 2022. 

I grew up in a Mennonite settler community in the Menno Colony, Paraguay. My maternal great-grandparents migrated to the Paraguayan Chaco in 1927 from Manitoba, Canada. Growing up, the general Mennonite history narrative was always (and continues to be) something like this: "There was nothing here but wilderness. We arrived in a 'Green Hell.' The 'Indians' welcomed us and helped us with the farming. We made something of this land. God sent us here to evangelize the 'Indians'. They came to us because they were starving and we helped them. We coexist peacefully to this day." This history is taught in our schools and it is celebrated once a year at the anniversary of the founding of the colony. 

After moving to Canada, I audited a Canadian history class at the University of Manitoba out of interest in 2007 and our textbook presented three different points of view on history: the dominant and widely accepted Eurocentric history, and the history from the point of view of indigenous people and women. Of course the narratives of certain events looked quite different depending on the perspective of the narrator. This course was such an eye opener and I have sought out first person narratives by indigenous people in the Chaco and more objective writing about indigenous people since. Those narratives paint a very different picture of my history and it humbles me I didn't know more about it sooner. (It ought to be taught in schools!)

Terra Nullius is the second print in my artist's book. I came across the term Terra Nullius (nobody's land) a few years ago while doing some reading about colonization. A text by Roger Epp, professor of political science at the University of Alberta was a kind of lightbulb moment for me and has shaped much of my understanding of my history: "The settler mythology (and legal fiction), ... is more powerful and ideologically attractive than any corrections proposed by historians. For it has continued to offer something more profound: a 'sacrament of innocence,' a 'new world,' a fresh start, a clean slate, and a justification of hard work. The mythology is much the same in Canada, in South Africa, in Israel (and Paraguay) – wherever settler people say, 'There was nothing here when we came, and we made something of it.' Terra nullius. Empty land. Vacant, uncultivated, unproductive. Somehow lacking or incomplete.” [Roger Epp. “'There was no one here when we came,' Lecture One: What is the 'Settler Problem,'” The Conrad Grebel Review 30/2 (2012). 124]. I felt I finally understood something that I've been grappling with for most of my life, namely making sense of the (hi)story I was taught in school and observing a much more complicated reality.

     The digitally printed background of the print is an early sketch map by Anglican missionary Seymour Hawtrey from 1900, who literally put the Chaco region on the map. Maps are used for laying claim, for surveying the land, for parcelling, selling, privatizing land, for claiming ownership. The dense forest is both beautiful and a terrifying wilderness, depending on the view of the beholder, providing life-giving space to some and representing something that needs taming and ordering for the other. The concept of Terra Nullius does not acknowledge the existence of the people in the landscape that form an integral part of it. The arrival of the missionary explorers, backed and supported by politicians and ranchers or explorers (figures printed on the backside of the paper) pushes the wilderness back. 

I