This project is funded by the EU Horizon MSCA PF 2022 programme and is led by Posdoctoral Fellow Daniel Bowman
Department of Cultural Studies and Languages
The NOMECH project examines fiction by Indigenous American authors of the late twentieth century for literary representations of animals, automobiles, and the natural environment.
NOMECH develops a novel approach to reading the road journey in American fiction (a genre which has historically excluded Indigenous writers) by centring Indigenous stories in which the environment is frequently presented as a character in and of itself, in contrast to the colonial tendency to personify the cars and ignore the living nonhuman world under the wheels.
Combining approaches from literary studies and the environmental humanities, NOMECH explores the extent to which Indigenous American authors present counter-narratives to the colonial story of automobility in which human contact with the natural environment is defined by driving over it: moving from a relationship based on dominance, conquest, and subjugation to one which places more emphasis on mutually beneficial ways of living with other animals and technology.
Public Events:
16-21 June 2025 “Indians in the Archives” Summer School, Amherst College, MA [details TBC]
Amherst College’s Robert Frost Library is home to the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection of Native American Literature, an archive of over 3000 Native-authored books and periodicals. As part of Amherst’s “rising sophomore” summer school, first-generation or low income students are given the chance to explore the college’s research facilities, with the aim of inspiring and equipping them with skills and experiences concerning research so that they might pursue it later on in their college career. “Indians in the Archives” works with Native collections, scholars, and archivists at Amherst College to expose these students to Indigenous texts and think about how these relate to questions of representation and research concerning Native American and Indigenous studies and inequality.
The NOMECH project makes two key contributions to this workshop:
- I (Daniel Bowman, the PI) will run a practical research workshop in the archives to demystify the process of academic and historical research. This session will involve breaking down the process of my research trip to KWEC in Summer 2024, from how I prepared before arriving at the archive, how I listened to the expert archivists and dealt with large quantities of data, to how I stored and referenced by findings after I left. The aim is to show students the often messy and imperfect processes of research, in the hope that this frames research spaces as places of enquiry and not judgement.
- The NOMECH project will also seek to bring the Indigenous writer, educator, and comic book artist Dr Lee Francis (Laguna Pueblo) to the archives to talk the students through the extensive collection of Indigenous comics and graphic novels in the KWEC collection.
Related Publications:
Bowman, Daniel (2024) Nation of Mechanics: Automobility, Animality, and Indigeneity in John Joseph Mathews's Sundown (1934). European Journal of American Studies. ISSN 1991-9336. 19.1. DOI: 10.4000/ejas.21304
This study demonstrates how John Joseph Mathews’s novel Sundown (1934)complicates the stereotype of Indigenous technological ineptitude by presenting Indigenous ownership and operation of automobiles following the Osage Oil Boom.Drawing on a range of literary historical sources such as Horseless Age, Mathews’s ecological writing, and traditional stories of the Osage, my reading of Sundown examines the inherent difficulties in separating the symbolism of the automobile from its material ecological consequences. In much the same way that animal symbols are co-opted in automotive branding, Indigenous identities are exploited in car culture to conjure up a nostalgic past in which the ecological and colonial violence of American Modernity is conveniently forgotten. I argue that Mathews’s Osage characters find themselves in a double-bind as they seek to refute stereotypes of technological primitivism whilst still maintaining and respecting Indigenous connections to the natural world.
Bowman, Daniel (2024) Cars, Cans, and Crying Indians: Automobility, Littering, and Indigeneity in 1970s US Environmental Literature. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. ISSN 1076-0962. DOI: 10.1093/isle/isae046
This study examines representations of automobility and littering in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) within the context of the “Crying Indian” PSA, demonstrating how settler environmentalism risks reenforcing stereotypes that oversimplify Indigenous relationships with land. I argue that through scenes of driving and littering, settler and Indigenous conceptions of land are revealed: as something that belongs to people in a colonial sense, and as something people belong with in Grounded Normativity. Native relationships with land emerge as counterpoints to the “Ecological Indian” stereotype and to colonial notions of land ownership.
The project is funded by the EU Horizon MSCA PF 2022 programme and is led by Posdoctoral Fellow Daniel Bowman