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1/6 At the 1893 World Fair there were numerous exhibitors of paper, paper products, and new processes for the manufacture of paper. World fairs offer us loaded sites to contemplate paper and its colonial histories/continuities. @PaperologyRAG
2/6 Amongst these (then) new technologies of paper production (and the endless printed materials of the Chicago Expo... advertisements, maps, catalogues), Simon Pokagon, Potawatomi author, sold a small birch bark booklet, "The Redman's Rebuke".
3/6 In it, he imagines the concerns of the Great Spirit: "Sons and daughters of the forest, your prayers for deliverance from the iron heel of oppression through centuries past are recorded in this book now open before me, made from the bark of the white birch.....
4/6 ...a tree under which for generations past you have mourned and wept. On its pages silently has been recorded your sad history." Pokagon notes "do not forget that this
success [on display at the Columbian expo] has been at the sacrifice of our homes and a once happy race."
success [on display at the Columbian expo] has been at the sacrifice of our homes and a once happy race."
5/6 He declared birch in its material form a "manifold bark" of "greater value" than paper. It was used for "hats, caps and dishes... maidens tied with it the knot that sealed their marriage vow; wigwams were made of it... canoes that outrode the violent storms on lake and sea."
6/6 What then might the materiality of mass produced pulp paper (exhibited by many paper manufactures at the 1893 fair) offer us by way of meaning? While we have many (sometimes good) uses for this paper it continues to signify extraction, alienation, and excess. @PaperologyRAG
