Title Pending 16968

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This article links U.S. imperialist militarism and radioactive pollution on Haudenosaunee land (Iroquoia) in New York State in terms of Ali Kadri’s concept of accumulation by waste, the notion that capital accumulation is a wasting, destructive process contingent on military force. Specifically, it connects the invasion and expropriation of Iroquoia by settler forces in 1779 to Niagara County’s role in the Manhattan Project as a major site of chemical manufacturing, uranium processing, and toxic waste disposal and contamination during World War II and the Cold War. It argues that the two historical moments form interlinked acts of “town destruction” as accumulation by waste, and it supports decolonization as a solution to militarized pollution. To make its argument, the article focuses on visual art by Haudenosaunee and non-Native artists in New York State who contest the theft and/or contamination of Indigenous land: Alan Michelson (Mohawk), Shelley Niro (Bay of Quinte Mohawk, Turtle Clan), Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora, Turtle Clan), G. Peter Jemison (Seneca, Heron Clan), and Joan Linder (non-Native); it pairs heterogenous media including sculpture, installation, drawing, and photography; and it draws on colonial and environmental history, Marxist and Indigenous decolonial thought, and Kadri’s theoretical work on the political economy of waste. By illuminating the poisonous intersections of settler colonization, munitions production, and military-industrial disposal, the article shines a light on artistic practices interrogating accumulation by waste in Iroquoia and imagining liberated futures based on land-back, ecological restoration, and care work.