Description
This paper uses both historical and critical heritage frameworks to interrogate the destruction of herd animals and trees as policies of war, and how these practices have tended to reinforce cultural identification with specific flora and fauna as part of indigenous and anticolonial movements of resistance. The paper explores the visual-material and intangible heritages of indigenous peoples across three continents (Europe, North America and the Middle East) whose identities were reconstellated by the experience of etho-nationalist and colonial violence between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking as its point of departure interwar RAF protocols which targeted herd animals in Iraq & Afghanistan, the paper moves both backwards and forwards in time, drawing parallels to 19C Buffalo culls sponsored by the US Army, and the destruction of flocks of sheep and the Tree of Gernika during the 1937 fascist assault on the ’spiritual capitol' of the Basques —immortalised in Picasso’s 1937 Guernica. In these processes, the targeting of flora and fauna alongside human beings served to underscore their profound interconnection with indigenous lifeways; thus as otherwise ‘modern’ ethnic, national and anti-colonial identities coalesced in the mid-twentieth century, trees and animals remained bound up within them.
