This Colonial Extraction Receipt explores the waste inherent in colonial practices and the unjust systems that enabled them. The receipt is divided into two sections: charges against Indigenous peoples for their alleged misuse of land, and charges against colonial powers for their actual destruction they brought upon. Colonizers justified the theft of Indigenous lands by claiming that Indigenous peoples were wasting resources, not utilizing them according to European standards. In reality, colonizers themselves were guilty of waste through over-extraction, ecological destruction, and the deliberate discrediting of Indigenous land use.
The Description column exposes the colonial justification that Indigenous land practices were inadequate or “unused”, labeling lands as “vacant” to validate their seizure and their ensuing and more current consequences. In contrast, the Price and Amount columns highlight the cultural, ecological, and social harm inflicted by colonization. The Quantity column symbolically represents the scale of these injustices, affecting entire continents, generations, ecosystems, resources, identities, and how they continue to persist.
By presenting colonization in this format, the receipt parodies capitalists’ understandings of ownership/transactions and how it holds others accountable. Viewers are then left to reconsider the return of what was stolen, the restoration of ecological systems, and the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty.
