In Against Extraction Matt Hooley traces a modern tradition of Ojibwe invention in Minneapolis and St. Paul from the mid-nineteenth century to the present as that tradition emerges in response to the cultural legacies of US colonialism. Hooley shows how Indigenous literary and visual art modernisms challenge the strictures of everyday life and question the ecological, political, and cultural fantasies that make multivalent US colonialism seem inevitable. Hooley analyzes literature and art by Louise Erdrich, William Whipple Warren, David Treuer, George Morrison, and Gerald Vizenor in relation to histories of Indigenous dispossession and occupation, enslavement and Black life, and environmental harm and care. He shows that historical narratives of these cities are intimately bound up with the violence of colonial systems of extraction and that concepts like Indigeneity and sovereignty extend beyond treaty-granted promises of political control. These works, created in opposition and proximity to the extraction of cultural, political, and territorial resources, demonstrate how Indigenous claims to life and land matter to rethinking and unmaking the social and ecological devastations of the colonial world.

"“Against Extraction develops intriguing new frameworks for reckoning with the impact of US colonialism and for understanding Indigenous art in the context of the settler city. Offering nuanced and revealing readings of works by five Ojibwe writers and artists, this thought-provoking book’s most significant contribution is its development of a concept of Indigenous modernism as the unsettling of colonialist removal and ruin.”" - How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States

"“Theoretically sophisticated and attuned to past and present forms of colonial violence, Against Extraction enlarges the meanings of Indigenous modernism to account for Indigenous art and literature centered in the Dakota homelands of the Twin Cities. Matt Hooley demonstrates how these artistic and literary works have grown from land-based relations and knowledge while also powerfully criticizing a settler colonialism and its denial of Indigenous lives that reaches far beyond Mní Sóta. This is an important and timely book.”" - Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte