Severing Union

The Queer Performance of
Steven Paul Judd’s “Stop the DAPL”

Steven Paul Judd’s “STOP the DAPL” graphic is not merely a clever appropriation of a well-known image. Rather, Judd reveals the imperial logic behind Benjamin Franklin’s “JOIN, or Die” and offers the possibility of Indigenous-centered alternatives. Where Franklin’s severed snake represents union as the British colonies’ best defense against the French and their best opportunity to increase land holdings in Indigenous territories, Judd’s indigenizing riff on the Lakota Black Snake prophecy rejects colonial possession by privileging Indigenous solidarity. Yet, “STOP the DAPL” goes beyond a mere reversal or refusal of Franklin’s original “JOIN, or DIE.” Rather, Judd “indigenizes” both Franklin’s original etching and the later anti-British “radical appropriation” of the image to present the intertribal, intergenerational, inter-ethnic solidarity around #NoDAPL as both analogous and counter to the colonial notion of “union.”

Published in Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas