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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
What happens to a settler society when it's disrupted by an oil boom?
Mary E. Thomas:At the heart of settling the boom, we were really trying to think about how the disruptive nature of a resource boom was settled, was ordered through settler colonialism's extension.
Narrator:In past decades, new oil plays have unsettled energy landscapes and imaginaries across The US. The book Settling the Boom, the Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil is an essay collection that studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the Northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. Here, the book's editors, Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun, get into it.
Mary E. Thomas:Hey, Bruce.
Bruce Braun:Hey, Mary.
Mary E. Thomas:How's it going?
Bruce Braun:It's going well. I'm looking forward to this.
Mary E. Thomas:Me too. I guess we should start by introducing ourselves. I'll start. I'm Mary Thomas. I'm a professor in women's, gender, and sexuality studies.
Mary E. Thomas:And right now, I'm on the Columbus campus of the Ohio State University, which is on Shawnee Land. I'm a white settler, and I use sheher pronouns. I did my PhD in geography at the University of Minnesota, which was where I met you, Bruce, in 1997.
Bruce Braun:Oh, Mary, you're aging us. That's a long time ago. You're referencing my job interview. I I didn't actually arrive at at Minnesota, I think, until 1999. I'm Bruce Braun, professor of geography at the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota, which is located on Dakota and Anishinaabe lands.
Bruce Braun:And I use he, him pronouns. Like Mary, I'm a white settler originally from Canada, another settler society, so I moved from one to another and, a lot of similar dynamics in both.
Mary E. Thomas:Well, acknowledging our position as white settlers, certainly is important to this book and and what we were trying to do in the book. At the heart of settling the boom, we were really trying to think about how the disruptive nature of a resource boom, in this case, an oil play in the Bakken, which is in Western North Dakota, was settled, was ordered through settler colonialism's extension. A deepening of settler colonialism was really how the city and the region sought to get things put back into place after the disruption of the boom. That's really important for us too because we, in the book, of course, wanted to pull out how these familiar and very normative frameworks of not just settler colonialism, but also gender and sexuality played out in the region in terms of the relations to the land and the temporality that was in place through white settler society there. But, you know, I was thinking about how this project got started probably ten years ago now, and you were driving through the region really regularly and noticing a lot of changes in Western North Dakota on your drives to Alberta and British Columbia.
Bruce Braun:Yeah. You're right. This story sort of has a personal aspect for me or kind of biographical almost. My family's from Calgary. I live in Minneapolis.
Bruce Braun:It's a nineteen hour drive back and forth. And I would make that drive once or twice a year, kind of this meditative drive through the Great Plains. And I always look forward to just heading west and having this kind of long drive ahead of me. Williston and to a lesser extent, Dickinson in North Dakota were was kind of a natural break point for this drive. Sort of like nine hours and then another nine hours the next day.
Bruce Braun:And so I'd often drive through these towns and stop for the night, take a cheap motel or something like that. Around twenty ten or so, I noticed dramatic changes to these landscapes. It was the aftermath of the great recession. Suddenly this was a part of the country that was booming. There were trucks on the roads.
Bruce Braun:There was construction. There were drilling rigs everywhere. Gas flaring at night. It was dusty. It was noisy.
Bruce Braun:And I couldn't find a hotel room. There was one trip where I slept in my car because there was just no availability. And I found this fascinating, this massive influx of of workers, changes to the landscape, the woefully inadequate infrastructure that everybody was trying to navigate. And the promise of development that was in the air is palpable. There's sort of this imagined future for this landscape.
Bruce Braun:And I was curious to just think about like, what does oil do to a region ecologically, socially, politically, economically? What happens to a settler society when it's disrupted by an oil boom? I increasingly was interested in maybe this was something that that needed to be looked into further and, you know, told Mary about it and sort of took off from there.
Mary E. Thomas:Do you think that being from Calgary and being from an oil city helped prime your ability to even see what was happening in Western North Dakota?
Bruce Braun:Yeah. Certainly. And, you know, also my earlier work on geology, I've done work on geological surveys and the whole way in which geology as a discipline and a mode of knowing the land opens up a sort of verticality to the state's territory, a way of seeing the land in three d and the opening that produces for, in a sense, exploiting or appropriating resources, the centrality of that kind of vision. But growing up in Calgary mattered. Now Calgary, of course, was an oil city.
Bruce Braun:I grew up in the middle of an oil boom, which transformed Calgary from a largely agricultural center to basically a control center of the global oil industry along the likes of Dallas and Houston and cities like that. So I've been wanting to write about oil and oil infrastructure for some time, but didn't quite know how to do it. Partly I felt uncomfortable writing about the oil industry in Alberta, partly because family members were there and, were involved in the oil industry. In fact, I have a brother who was deeply involved in the oil industry and would leak documents to me, which were always like very interesting to read, but I realized that if I ever said anything about them, I'd get them in trouble. I was seeing the world through an oil boom already when I was driving through there and could recognize it.
Mary E. Thomas:Yeah. You know, the timing of this too is such that it's important for us to situate this oil boom in terms of the specific geology because it was also at a time when the technology of oil extraction was changing really radically. And in a lot of ways, the Bakken region allowed oil companies to perfect fracking technologies. And it's a sort of what we call in the book this geotechnological fix, both to the great recession, but also to this previous notion that there's such a thing as an end to oil. Suddenly, we have these new technologies through fracking that are opening up depths that were previously unthinkable.
Mary E. Thomas:And in a lot of ways, the geological formation of this region is just oil all the way down. Very different from Alberta's tar sands. Right?
Bruce Braun:Yeah. Yeah. Very different from the from the tar sands. Although, you know, Alberta has a lot of conventional oil too. The thing we should talk maybe a little bit about the specificity of Western North Dakota since this is really important to our story.
Bruce Braun:Right? We're talking about the Williston Basin, which is a particular geological formation that has a number of oil and gas bearing layers, geological layers. The oil is trapped in in tight shale, which means that the rock is porous but the pores are poorly connected. What that means is that oil can't flow through the formation. And when you drill into the formation, all you can capture is the oil that's immediately next to the well.
Bruce Braun:When you draw that oil out, more oil can't flow into the well. And so it's not a very productive oil field. And until until the early two thousands when fracking technology is developed. And a second technology which is horizontal drilling, which means that you could drill down for a mile or two and then you could turn the drill horizontally and drill horizontally through a very thin geological formation for another mile or two. And the combination of that and fracking, and what fracking does is it introduces pathways between the pores.
Bruce Braun:It allows the oil to migrate. Those two technologies really dramatically changed this this geological formation and made it economically viable. That's a huge part of the story. Mary, I think you you referenced this as a kind of a geotechnical fix, which enabled capital to circulate, in the middle of the great recession and suddenly produced this oil boom where it could attract workers to a very remote location, far from cities and far from most employment centers, partly because workers were looking for work. This, you know, unemployment rates were extraordinarily high.
Bruce Braun:Thousands and thousands of workers were flocking to the region. So this the geological formation matters here. It's not just a side note to the story. It is it is central to the very story of of what happened.
Mary E. Thomas:Yeah. And in fact, the fracking at that time too was such that one well was being dug probably every three to four acres for just one well. But I I remember that at that time, it took 2,000 trucking events just to to drill and frac one oil well. So it's not just that, you know, you need workers to work in an oil play, but it was specifically this kind of fracking required a lot of workers because everything from having to bring the clinker in to ground the oil pad to the water trucks, you know, the creation of the roadways for these trucks to even go down, bringing scoria rock to line the roadways, you know, to all of the chemicals, the drilling equipment, all of it required so much labor power for this oil play to happen. It was one of the only places in the country at the time where that level of hiring was happening.
Mary E. Thomas:I remember when we were in Williston, One of the job services people told us that there was a CNN story in February. I think it was called double your salary in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota. And she said literally the next day, people started arriving in the hundreds every day. So the there's the the train line, the Amtrak train goes right through Williston. People were just showing up with these one way tickets.
Mary E. Thomas:No vehicles, nowhere to sleep, no plans. But with desperation, mortgages, underwater, you know, demands to support their families, they just arrived. And many of them were actually employed by the end of the day. Right? Right at the train station, there was a job placement service office, and people could often get jobs really quickly.
Mary E. Thomas:That didn't mean they could get housing. You sleeping in your car in Williston was a kind of foreshadowing of what ended up happening at the height of the oil boom when you had tens of thousands of people sleeping in cars, sleeping in RVs, setting up camp. You know, the whole region was really overwhelmed by the sudden influx of labor, which is something that I found really interesting. Right? Because the city was so anxious about how to settle all these men.
Mary E. Thomas:Right? And there were so many fears around too many untethered men and what their gender expressions and sexuality would mean for this small town and these regional small towns. And that was just fed by the media frenzy at the time too. Right? All of the stories were about violence, sex work, and just fears of what happens with so many men in one place.
Mary E. Thomas:And I do think that I think I remember that Williston's population at the height of the boom was 80 male.
Bruce Braun:Yeah. That was a remarkable statistic and it reflected the kind of worker that was attracted to the boom. Not exclusively men, but a large majority. And indeed, you know, it was the experience of workers that kind of drew me to the initial research there. You know, this was, as we mentioned, the great recession, people had lost jobs, their mortgages were underwater, they had student debt.
Bruce Braun:People were coming to Williston to solve problems in some ways and to some extent to keep alive this American dream. Williston marketed itself at the time as the last great place for opportunity. There was something really interesting in that marketing slogan about implying the death of the American dream and yet it's still alive here in this one place. I was very interested in the experience of these workers who were coming with a sense of desperation, hoping that working in the oil fields and getting those kinds of salaries would allow them to solve problems elsewhere in life. They weren't coming there imagining that they were settling In Williston, that was one of the problems for the city was how do you translate this influx of male workers into a settled community?
Bruce Braun:I think that's one of the things that this book has explored is the modes by which a particular kind of form of life was shaped in Williston in the face of the disruptions of an oil boom. So, you know, the work that I did by myself and also with Jessica Layman, who now teaches at Durham University in England, was to do interviews with workers and to explore their experience, but also to start to think about the way in which a set of discourses circulated around these workers. So, you know, in our interviews with these workers, one of the things that we explored was what they were gaining from coming to Williston, what they were what their hopes were and so on. And so many of them talked about their precarity and trying to resolve their precarity. And, the idea that this was gonna do that was something which we came to talk about as a kind of a cruel optimism because it, you know, tethered these workers to some very dangerous work conditions, whether they were truckers on this inadequate infrastructure or working the drilling rigs or often a very unregulated oil industry or whether they were, you know, monitoring the gas and oil facilities and the tanks and so on, also a dangerous activity.
Bruce Braun:And many of them actually didn't manage to save the money that they thought they were gonna save. It was extraordinarily expensive to live there. Rents were as high as Manhattan. Food expenses were extreme. One of the things that we sort of learned from our interviews was that the boom was not all that it set itself out to be.
Bruce Braun:That these were precarious workers and they were thrown into a different form of precarity when they got to North Dakota. Jesse and I spent some time thinking about also the way in which a sort of discourses sort of circulated around these workers, kind of the dangerous masses that had arrived in this rural community, bringing with them violence and the drug trade and sex work. The idea that this was a disruption to a rural ideal, a settler ideal that had been established, by Norwegian agricultural settlers many decades earlier. Some of the questions that began to interest us were the questions of whose lives were really valued, who was seen as a threat, whose lives were protected, whose were exposed and rendered vulnerable, what modes of existence were policed and which were not. And we spent some time thinking about how these discourses fed into a particular way of ordering the boom, of trying to produce a particular kind of order.
Bruce Braun:And of this an order which as, you know, we talk about in the introduction and through a number of chapters, presuppose the settler futurity, presuppose that this sort of extension of a certain kind of settler affluence, a white settler affluence into the future, and and how do you establish that? And through what policies, through what practices?
Mary E. Thomas:Yeah. Lauren Berlant's notion of crow optimism, comes up repeatedly in the book. It's really an anchor for our argument, helped us to think about how the future is a fantasy. She writes that fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories about how they and the world add up to something. In Western North Dakota, for settlers, this attachment to this better future justified the ways in which they were undergoing hardships in the present.
Mary E. Thomas:Right? So you mentioned the marketing campaign of the last great place for opportunity, which Morgan Adamson also, you know, takes up in her chapter in the book. When she looks at the ways that Willis Den is marketing its future through trying to get women to settle into town to stay and the repeated imagery of white babies in that marketing material, which I also show in my chapter, the way that the economic development office kept centering getting women to settle, getting women to stay, certainly has a long history in the region in terms of the settler colonialism, but it also is very specifically about extending whiteness into the foreseeable future. Right? It's not about getting anyone to come and settle and stay, which isn't just settler colonialism.
Mary E. Thomas:It's also white supremacy, but it's also heteropaternalism, which in my chapter, I really draw out the kind of history of the heteropatriarchies, through the military, through the settler migration of Norwegian Americans to the region, and the ways in which this kind of settler history is told over and over and over again in every little dusty county museum through even the Lewis And Clark Trail, the fort tourism, all of these things are just foregrounding the white American so called family in order to show that, you know, they are the rightful future of the region. Right? They're in the past and they belong in the future as well. And, of course, then the indigenous history and the indigenous claims to land, the indigenous sovereignty of the region's always situated as in the distant past. So the fort tourism always has these summer displays with teepees and native Americans in nineteenth century garb doing reenactments of trading at these forts.
Mary E. Thomas:Even though we, of course, know that one fifth of all Bakken oil is produced on the Fort Berthold reservation lands in the region. One of the things that we do focus on throughout the book is to make sure that we don't just attend to settler colonialism, but that we remember that settler colonialism is always gendered and sexualized through these cisheteropatriarchies. I remember the one museum in Watford City, I think. The Bottom Floor was all of the oil history of the region, and the Top Floor was all of the settler history. And there was just this huge row of aprons.
Mary E. Thomas:Do you remember that upstairs? And they even had, like, a a woman's wedding dress on display, you know, from the nineteenth late nineteenth, early twentieth century. And so they were archiving this domesticity. Right? The role of the wife and mother in literally settling the white settler presence in North Dakota.
Mary E. Thomas:And it was certainly that formation of of femininity that the city was trying to rejuvenate and extend. Right? It's all about extending the reach of these heteropatriarchal families into the future. So they no longer had, you know, the reliance on the prairie homesteader, but rather they were trying to get businesses to come and set up what they called her economies. And so as an urban geographer, I was fascinated by what a her economy was meant to fuel for this regional economic development in these cities, these small cities.
Mary E. Thomas:What it meant was they wanted to draw retail opportunities. Right? And they wanted to make sure that they also had childcare. Childcare was in short supply throughout the boom. It was a real problem because women wanted to work as well, and women who had children couldn't get anyone to watch their children so that they could work.
Mary E. Thomas:And that was something that the city was always acutely aware of. And in the years after the boom, they built a lot of new schools. There were huge investments in housing construction, but particularly in suburban housing where they would have these, you know, individual family houses that all of these oil workers were meant to bring their wives and children to, you know, inhabit these houses. But the capital at the time just flooded in because it yes. We know with the great recession, housing collapsed.
Mary E. Thomas:The housing market collapsed. And so companies that invested in housing really had nowhere else to go in the country except Western North Dakota. And they very quickly laid out all of these suburban developments. And, I mean, how many did we see where they had poured the curbs around these neighborhoods, but then the neighborhoods were never built? Because the commodity price drop in 02/2014 happened so suddenly that they literally there was one, I I think we have a photo of it in the book, where they finished the pour midway through the block.
Mary E. Thomas:It just ends. It should have extended at least another hundred feet, but it literally just stopped. And that is another kind of marker on the landscape of the bust and how the bust happened very quickly. And it disrupted all of these plans and notions that Williston had for its future. But of course, its future was still being written through these narratives around the extension of settler colonialism despite the so called bust.
Mary E. Thomas:The urban planners kept telling us, oh, we're just catching up. Right? That there's no bust here. As you can see, we're still busy. We've got pipeline construction.
Mary E. Thomas:We're really just playing catch up. And this is when they're starting to build their huge new airport that now has very few flights coming in and out every day. And they're building all kinds of other infrastructure just assuming that there's always going to be another boom down the road. Right? There's always going to be the demand for labor in the region through production.
Mary E. Thomas:One of the economic development officers assumed that the technology wouldn't change, that the levels of workers needed to frac would be the same as the levels of workers needed to maintain production. And so he had predicted that there would be a 50,000 people in Williston by 2020. Outrageous. Right? There's, like, 25 to 30,000 people in Williston right now.
Mary E. Thomas:And we know that, you know, with pipelines, you also just see a a huge drop in the number of people that you need to maintain any of the rigs. And then we also know that they got more so called efficient at fracking so that now instead of having one well per pad, you can have what's what is it now? 32 wells that extend in this kind of spoke like pattern out from a center. And so it takes a lot fewer people to maintain when you're not driving huge distances between wells, but you're able just to go to one pad.
Bruce Braun:Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's so fascinating about the boom is how a certain kind of future is projected. We look at these graphs that the, economic development office in Williston had, the right hand margin of the graph was always an ascending line into the future. It was gonna be an ascending line of of oil production and an ascending line of population growth. The future was was going to be affluent and prosperous and there's gonna be sustained growth.
Bruce Braun:And it created this sense that oil was the pathway to an assured kind of affluent future, settled future in Western North Dakota. And even if oil itself was going to run out, it was gonna establish the foundation for a sustained settler affluence. And and I think all the investments in infrastructure were part of both attracting the right kind of settler. What was most paradigmatic of that was this huge recreation center that the city built, which when I arrived in Williston astounded me because I hadn't seen a recreation center like that even in the city where I lived. It was just this beautiful had a wave pool.
Bruce Braun:It had these indoor soccer, facilities and all of this. It was built by the city for the city residents. And it was specifically trying to get families to settle in Williston. When you have this influx of male workers who are not just seen as a threat, but also seen as temporary, they're gonna go. They're gonna leave.
Bruce Braun:Right? So how do you actually anchor this workforce in the city so as to produce this future? But it assumed so many things. It assumed the continued production of oil. It assumed a certain level of oil price.
Bruce Braun:It assumed that a certain amount of labor would be required to do that work. And one of the things that we've seen is that the oil industry has become more and more efficient. It has increased its productivity. It needs fewer and fewer workers to extract the oil that it extracts. Part of this is through technological changes, part of it is through sort of what we might call digital oil, all the ways in which the exploration for oil all the way through to the monitoring of oil wells and so on no longer needs people there in person.
Bruce Braun:You can do it through algorithms. You can do it through sensors that feed into people living in Dallas, far away, looking at computer monitors. Right? I mean, it's a very different oil industry than it was at the beginning of the boom. And then so many aspects of the boom involved one off employment, right?
Bruce Braun:Building all the, the web of pipelines that, that link the wells to the rail facilities or to other pipelines and so on. You build that pipeline, that takes a lot of labor, but then once that pipeline's built, it doesn't require any more. So all these projections at the right margins, these projections of a certain kind of affluent settler future, were always predicated on these kinds of what we might call a certain kind of cruel optimisms that this was sustainable into the future. But what was also so striking to us was the way it was predicated on what we might think of as a set of settler assumptions about land, about time, about space, about the state. The way in which land was understood.
Bruce Braun:You know, I recently read, Max de Bordon's book Pollution is Colonialism. One of the things Max argues is a distinction between capital L land and small l land. For Liberon capital L land is land as relation. It's a way of understanding land that is common in Indigenous communities, That land names a set of relations, it's not just an object or a passive entity. Whereas small L land names something different.
Bruce Braun:It names land as resource, as stock, as standing reserve, as a sink for pollution and so on. And one of the things that you you see in during the boom was this this understanding of land as small l land, as something which could be exploited, something that could be used and used up. So there are these kind of, like, settler assumptions about land that were never unsettled. They were presupposed from the beginning. And at the same time, instead of ideas about time where certain kinds of pasts were elevated and celebrated in the forts, in the literature, in the telling of histories, the museums, a settler history that erased Indigenous presence and Indigenous temporalities.
Bruce Braun:And at the same time, futures that are imagined in the form of a prosperous white settler community. And that was always the future that was imagined. The white family, it was always centered around the image of the toddler who's going to grow up and be the next generation. Pictures of white toddlers were everywhere on all the literature. It was really quite something to see.
Bruce Braun:So there's these presupposed settler temporalities, presupposed understandings of land that's sort of silently work in the background. And we talk about these as kind of background epistemologies of the oil boom and that these background epistemologies were almost always settler epistemologies. And I think that that is a theme that comes out almost in all of the chapters in one way or another.
Mary E. Thomas:Yeah. The oil companies also made sure that they dropped wells quickly when the commodity price dropped because of the leasing timelines that they had to, you know, maintain the lease. They had to drop these wells, even though they wouldn't frack. They kept them unfracked to wait until the commodity price came back up. It's not really anything we could get into in the book.
Mary E. Thomas:We weren't able to talk about the structure of leasing and mineral rights so much, But there's definitely an uneven wealth. People who had their own mineral rights to their land were able to make a lot of money, but people who sold those rights in the past suddenly had no control over whether or not a well was gonna be dug in their own backyard. I think that the ways in which the oil companies also make claim onto the land in order for the future price to be mineable in in essence, right, is another way that they extend oil into the future and ensure this kind of reliance on petroleum. One of the things that fascinated me was after the fact, when we look at how much oil is actually produced from some of these wells, it's really not at all what they projected it to be. So you have all of these companies coming in and projecting the amount of oil that's being held or the amount of oil that they'll be able to to bring up.
Mary E. Thomas:But the shale is so tight there that you actually have to keep fracking it. It's not something that you frack once, and the oil just continues to flow for years and years. Some of these wells, you actually have to frack once a year in order for the oil to to come through. And so when the commodity price is fluctuating, usually you just get that first burst of oil production, and then it closes back down. Right?
Mary E. Thomas:The shale becomes tight again and the oil can't be released. But the oil companies always take the best production month and tell you that that's what's going to be projected into the future. They call it the estimated ultimate recovery or the EUR, which we write about. But in that way, they also use the sense of geology. Right?
Mary E. Thomas:And this idea that the land is resourced all the way down and propel it into the future. And there's a little infrastructure in place for that future fracking to happen. So the wells have been leased. The land has been leased for the wells. The wells might have been dug and it's just waiting to be fracked.
Mary E. Thomas:Right? And you can look at the rig counts and the fracking counts on the North Dakota websites that the state maintained about where activity is happening. And you can just track the price commodity. Right? It has to reach a certain level before it makes any sense to go in and start to refrack these wells.
Mary E. Thomas:But there's the assumption, of course, that they will be refracked. And it's also it's it's putting a deadly infrastructure in place forever. I mean, these wells are going to exist always until millions of years when the land has shifted such that they're broken apart. But until then, you're gonna have all kinds of problems, environmental problems, right? Horrible toxicity that that's going to happen around the wells.
Mary E. Thomas:And so it's it's a kind of temporality to fracking that's not necessarily foregrounded in the national media or in the oil companies. But, of course, it's the underlying truth of the oil industry and of fracking. And it's one of the things that we know that the water protectors and a lot of indigenous resistance groups have tried to bring to the foreground. We have a couple chapters that address that in the book. I really like Tommy Davis's chapter.
Mary E. Thomas:He takes a couple of examples of settler production, of aesthetic production around the kind of material conditions of labor in the region, but then he transposes some indigenous art and activism onto those. So for the the settler films that he looks at, they're documentary films. They really focus on the oil worker and the oil worker's family. They're often close-up views of these haggard workers who are exhausted by the labor conditions that they're toiling under, including, you know, sleeping in a truck. There's one documentary that is this really close-up shots of men who's who are sleeping together in a cab of a truck.
Mary E. Thomas:And then the other film he looks at is called White Earth, and it looks at the children who are growing up under an oil boom and sort of imagining what kind of future potentials they have. And it's also very much focused on the biography of these children. But when he turns to the work of some indigenous artists and films, he looks at how they're imagining the land. And it's not these close-up autonomous settler subjects they're interested in. Not at all.
Mary E. Thomas:They're interested in rethinking how we see land and how we imagine a relational land. He looks at the winter count collectives and Kanupa Hansko Lugar's video, We Are in Crisis. They actually use drones to go above the Ossetesakawin camp during Standing Rock to be able to mark the kind of relational resistance that was happening both with others, but also with the land. And so in that sense, there's that sense of the extractive individual, right? The extractive settler colonial in the way that we fetishize these individual men.
Mary E. Thomas:But the other view is the relational view of land, which provides us with a different kind of way to see. If we bring out the other ways to see and to know, then we can begin to work for other sorts of decolonial attachments than the kind of attachments that we note in the book that are always there for the taking in settler society. Right? They're the background epistemologies. They're just ready to be grabbed onto.
Mary E. Thomas:Right? The media is doing it. The local actors in North Dakota are doing it. There's a lot of novels and other television shows or memoirs from the region, and they're all just able to grab onto these very familiar background epistemologies of settler colonialism and settler heteropatriarchies in order to just propel us into the settler future and to also assemble an idea of time that's always an expansion. It's a linear timeline, and it's just gonna unfold into the future, and it's just assumed to be settler all the way through.
Bruce Braun:Mary, I think it's interesting that you turn to Standing Rock. Kai Bossworth chapter on Standing Rock and and specifically on policing at Standing Rock is actually a fascinating chapter to me. The Dakota Access Pipeline was built or was proposed and then and then constructed with great resistance, in part to get oil from the Bakken oil fields to market. Previous to that, to the building of the pipeline, it all had to be transported by train and that was very expensive. And it, in a sense, added a price premium to oil coming out of North Dakota and made it less competitive on global markets.
Bruce Braun:So there was a strong incentive by the oil industry and the pipeline industry, and they're not always quite the same but they're deeply interconnected, to build the Dakota Access Pipeline, to really push it through in order to reduce the cost of Bakken oil and make it competitive. This pipeline was initially planned to go North of Bismarck and to cross the Missouri River North of Bismarck in North Dakota. Bismarck, of course, is the capital of North Dakota. It's a white settler city and there was resistance to that amongst the residents of Bismarck and so it was rerouted North of Standing Rock through indigenous land. Instead of putting a white settler community at risk and their water resources at risk, it instead put indigenous communities downstream at risk.
Bruce Braun:And the Standing Rock Protests were very much about protecting water, protecting land, asserting sovereignty and so on. But what CHI looks at is the way in which the settler state and policing were able to present themselves as the vulnerable entity. And that it was the indigenous communities and indigenous activists and protesters who were the aggressors. So this flipping of the situation where those who are protecting their water, protecting their land become the aggressors and those who are policing them are the ones that are vulnerable. And he sort of draws out what he calls an aesthetics of vulnerability.
Bruce Braun:And the way that that aesthetics of vulnerability actually allows for the militarization of policing, of what is seen as an aggressive indigenous protest. And he really sort of digs into that. But one of the things that's striking is how long that history of presenting the settler as the vulnerable one has been in American history. And we see it in the stories at the forts, in the telling of, of the frontier and so on. That story of that, that, that mythical story of the frontier, the settler who needs to be protected.
Bruce Braun:And so this old story gets replayed in a very violent form in order to get oil to market. And I think Kai's chapter is, like, so good at pulling out this aesthetic and vulnerability and showing its continuity is, but also its extraordinary power. I really like Kai's chapter and I fit well, even though he wasn't looking specifically at the Bakken oil fields, he was looking at the global logistics, the infrastructure that make extraction possible and that tie together sites of extraction with sites of production and consumption elsewhere.
Mary E. Thomas:Yeah. And we know that too that the the sites of extraction were intimately connected to war, to sites of war, not just in the past in terms of the US army's so called clearing the land for settler settlement, but also literally some of the infrastructure in the Bakken oil fields were brought directly from Iraq and Afghanistan. Halliburton was a huge logistics company operating where they would bring temporary housing from the army bases in Iraq. I think it was mostly from Iraq, but also some from Afghanistan, Right to Williston. Right?
Mary E. Thomas:It was right in the heart of it. And in fact, one of the marketing campaigns of the city was the Bakken Booyah, which is really reminiscent of the marines' oorah and the kind of in your face masculinity. A lot of the workers were vets. A lot of these oil companies prioritize hiring veterans. And so people were coming back from war and going straight to work in the oil fields.
Mary E. Thomas:And so I do really like Kai's approach too to show how the partial state, The US partial state is so able and easily able to just make police look vulnerable, to make it look like they're the ones under attack. And we know that the oils from the Bakken is highly volatile. There were those magnificently horrific trains exploding right all over the country because of Bakken crude all the way from the Dakotas all the way to Quebec. In fact, the Bakken oil went just a few blocks from my house here in Columbus. It went right through Columbus.
Mary E. Thomas:And so the idea of who's at risk, who's the one who's living through violence is it's also framed through a kind of settler colonial concern, you know, for white people. I think that your chapter with Jesse on the dark side of the boom, the narratives of the boom, also use that fear of violence and that fear of disruption to problematically situate women as as these kind of passive victims of male violence in a way that distracts people's understanding from sort of those broader forces that are at play in creating the conditions of violence itself. Right? So creating the conditions of violence itself. Right?
Mary E. Thomas:So it becomes these these really horrible acts of violence against women in the region. But, you know, the mostly the media is concerned about the white women who are victims of these crimes, including one woman from Sydney, Montana who was murdered. But, you know, we know that it was native girls and women who were mostly at risk of violence in the region and and continue to be.
Bruce Braun:Absolutely. And I think the whole language of violence is in relation to the oil boom in North Dakota. They're the aspects that Mary just noted and the sense that women in particular were at risk of violence from male migrant workers. And there was violence, but it also effaced violences because native women, it effaced the ecological violence of the oil industry. It effaced the violence of that was enacted on workers' bodies every day.
Bruce Braun:One of the things that Jesse and I were interested in is what counts as violence and what doesn't count as violence. What violence is visible, what violence is not visible. And, you know, what is seen as a threat and what's not seen as a threat.
Mary E. Thomas:Yeah. Violence was always seen to be coming from outside. Right? It was being imported to this kind of rural small town idyllic where everyone is Norwegian American and the good Lutheran where people go to church. You know, like, there's no violence already.
Mary E. Thomas:We know that's, well, malarkey to put it in a family friendly way. There's also the fact that violence was what created North Dakota to begin with. Right? As such, there would be no state if it weren't for the violence of genocide, mass starvation, disease, but it's always seemed to be important. And, you know, the city is responding by building huge new jails facilities, hiring a bunch of new police officers, and the FBI sets up a field office.
Mary E. Thomas:Right? The first new field office in The US for some time.
Bruce Braun:I think thirty years. There haven't been a new field office in thirty years, but the FBI sets up a new field office in Williston, and partly in response to a perceived drug trade. And I think that's itself is interesting. On the one hand, it assumes that there was no presence of drugs in rural North Dakota prior to this. But the other thing that is worth noting is that the use of drugs and especially stimulants was necessary for the long hours that workers were putting in.
Bruce Braun:You know, one of the ways that I've come to think about the use of different kinds of stimulants and illegal substances in the oil industry is as a kind of subsidy for the oil industry. This is workers who are in a sense jacking up their bodies to do the work in these long hours. They're the ones that are at risk of being arrested and jailed and and so on. They're the ones that are policed and it's not the oil industry's long work days that are seen as the problem. The question of violence, the question of criminality and so on in the oil boom, It's such a complex question and it hides so much.
Bruce Braun:This comes back to the question of settling the boom. It's settled in one form and not another. And I think that that's something we come back to over and over again. And one of the reasons we come back to that is so that we can begin to think, well, what other kind of futures are imaginable that are not this future? One of the things we might think about this, what we see at Williston is a a kind of a geosocial formation.
Bruce Braun:Right? The way in which a geological formation is actualized in a certain kind of social formation, but that it doesn't have to be actualized that way. You can imagine different kinds of geosocial formations. Ones that build on land as relation rather than land as resource. Ones that imagine an indigenous futurity rather than a separate futurity.
Bruce Braun:Ones that don't necessarily circle around the nuclear family. I think that the question of violence that Jesse and I were looking at opened up into so many different kinds of questions. And that that chapter, we were really trying to sort of think through various ways that violence was being framed or the ways that it was being rendered visible and needing to be policed or invisible and allowing to just be a background violence that continues.
Mary E. Thomas:Those kind of stories also really limit the range of representations that women have in the region. Right? It's either the past wife or a sex worker or maybe an entrepreneur that started to happen a little bit later in the timeline to around the women who come in and build businesses for other women. But all of these stories definitely set up this idea that if you do the hard work now, the future will arrive. We end the book thinking about infrastructure and the way that that is literally written into the infrastructure of the region.
Mary E. Thomas:Right? That it's waiting. This Williston is now built itself into a future and it's waiting for that future to come. It's got all the new schools. It's got that beautiful recreation center.
Mary E. Thomas:You know, there's been a new truck bypass. It's not new anymore, but the truck bypass to make sure all of those oil industry trucks don't go right through the middle of town like they were doing back in 02/2012 and 02/2013. There's new wastewater treatment plans. There's all those new cops. Right?
Mary E. Thomas:And all those prison cells just waiting to be filled. It's the idea that, you know, the population might not be there now, but someday it will be there because oil's always going to be in the future. And that's what the city has put itself into very deep debt, banking on that future that is supposed to arrive and likely never will.
Bruce Braun:We almost had to end with infrastructure, because it was being built everywhere. And, you know, infrastructure comes with a promise. It's always promising that there's some sort of future that is coming. Right? That the infrastructure is going to enact a future.
Bruce Braun:It's gonna make a future problem possible. It's gonna produce the grounds for a futurity that that is desired. It anticipates a prosperous, affluent settler future. But at the same time, it normalizes and entrenches and extends Indigenous dispossession. I mean, this infrastructure is being built on Indigenous land with no sense of an Indigenous futurity.
Bruce Braun:Which is not to say that infrastructures can't also produce Indigenous futurities, and they can. But this was really to an extent extend and entrench a certain form of life, a certain kind of of existence, and a certain kind of settler society. There is a cruel optimism, as Mary notes, to these infrastructures. And I think the new international airport is the most interesting. And we end with some photographs that I took in a trip through Williston A Few Years ago.
Bruce Braun:And I walked around the airport. I did not see anybody except for one worker who was polishing the floors. And it's this beautiful, shiny, new international airport. There are two purposes. One was to get the airport out of the center of town and open up that center of town for development for more housing for this expanded population that was imagined.
Bruce Braun:But also the idea that you need an international airport to connect Williston globally, that these global logistical networks were so essential for an ex a site of extraction, and that you needed this infrastructure to guarantee this prosperous future. You know, and what's so striking about the airport now is it sits empty. There are two or three flights that come in or out of that airport every day. I mean, you can count the number of passengers that come in and out of Williston, you know, maybe a 50 passengers. It's very few people coming in and out of this very, very expensive airport.
Bruce Braun:It actually doesn't bring about the future that it imagines. Instead, it sort of saddles the city with debt. At a certain point after 02/2014, its bonds, its municipal bonds were actually given junk status by the markets. So one of the things that I often think about is that in these kind of oil booms, and this isn't always the case, but so frequently, kind of sustained prosperity is actually leads to what I see as more of an exhaustion, an exhausted resource, exhausted land, exhausted workers, almost like an exhausted hope. Very few people at the end of the day really benefit from these resource booms.
Bruce Braun:How do you untether hopes and dreams from a settler futurity which actually doesn't deliver everything it imagines it delivers? So as to open up possibilities for other kinds of imaginings and other imaginings of futures that aren't as disabling for so many.
Mary E. Thomas:Well, it might be a good time to close the cover on this podcast by talking about the cover, actually. Let's talk about the rate design. I was just so happy with the way the book turned out, but, of course, it turned out the way it did because of the remarkable artwork by Jessica Christie, who had, an installation called Through the Window, My Experience as a Woman Living in the Boom, in which she produced a 50 of these small boxes where she put found objects from the Bakken region in these boxes and then displayed them in a very tight space to give a sense of claustrophobia. The claustrophobia she felt when she was living, I think it was in Wynaut at the time, and she's from North Dakota. But the the press did really a great job in using those boxes to design the cover of the book.
Mary E. Thomas:And everybody interested, in seeing more of Jessica Christie's work, you can go to her website noted on the back cover. It's jessicachristy.com. We've really touched on a lot of themes around the actual materials that she has in the in the boxes that are on our cover, including the the rock that's grounding the pads. Right? You've got this red rock that's ubiquitous in the region for roads.
Mary E. Thomas:There's a worker's glove, discarded pack of cigarettes. The Marlboro man was certainly, this kind of strong man oil worker was one of those repeated aesthetics in the national media, the caution tape around, you know, construction sites, etcetera. I wanna thank Jessica again for letting us use her artwork.
Bruce Braun:Yeah. It's a striking cover and, really happy with it, the way it turned out.
Mary E. Thomas:Well, there's a lot we couldn't talk about, so I hope you all will read the book, all you listeners out there. And thanks for thanks for tuning in.
Bruce Braun:Thanks, Mary. Enjoyed talking about this again.
Mary E. Thomas:Always. We could talk about this forever.
Bruce Braun:We could.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Settling the Boom, the Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.