Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad by Manu Karuka (review)

Published in the same year as the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Manu Karuka's Empire's Tracks makes an important intervention into ongoing conversations about the history and legacy of the transcontinental railroad. Karuka focuses his analysis on multiple understudied and historically overlooked communities, including the Indigenous nations on whose largely unceded land much of the transcontinental railroad was constructed, as well as the Chinese workers who built the most difficult parts of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad tracks. Karuka points out that the "vast bulk of the space claimed as domestic territory by the continental United States was incorporated during the era of railroad building," highlighting the inextricable nature and simultaneity of the transcontinental railroad project and colonial violence and warfare (42). Blending historical with literary analysis, Karuka delves into railroad archives, novels, memoirs, newspaper accounts, oral histories, and correspondence from the period to unveil the transcontinental railroad project as one fueled and motivated by continental imperialism. By focusing on communities and realities that are usually a mere backdrop in railroad histories, if given any space in the story at all, Empire's Tracks reconstructs and recovers a narrative "more attentive to the reactive nature of imperialism" in an "effort to realize questions and capacities that have been here all along" (xiii, xv).

In his first two chapters, Karuka outlines the theoretical framework and core arguments for his book, which centers on three themes: continental imperialism, countersovereignty, and modes of relationship. Karuka defines countersovereignty as a position of reaction, as "the U.S. pretension to legal authority over territory and bodies," and explores this idea throughout his book as it relates specifically to the colonization enacted through the railroad corporations in collaboration with the US government (65). Reading the narratives of three Native women writers, Ella Deloria, Sarah Winnemucca, and Winona LaDuke, Karuka "shifts emphasis of a critique of political economy from the production and reproduction of capital to the production and reproduction of relationships" (20). He takes an unprecedented look at the history and impact of the transcontinental railroad in Indigenous communities in the Great Plains, dedicating separate chapters to the Lakota, the Cheyenne, and the Pawnee nations. Karuka demonstrates that while "Indigenous movements tracked the cycle of seasons on the Plains . . . reflecting a deep and abiding commitment to the place itself," continental imperialism in the form of the transcontinental railroad bisected and disrupted this mode of relationship in perpendicular lines across the region (130). He explicitly attributes the ecological devastation of the Great Plains to the 90 million acres of railroad land grants in the region, calling for the decolonization of that space and the reestablishment of "the Plains as a site of international coordination between Indigenous nations" (36).

Empire's Tracks serves as an invitation to recontextualize colonial narratives within the silences and erasures inherent in these narratives, uncovering and decolonizing communities of knowledge and relationship through the careful study of archives, rumors, oral histories, literary representations, maps, and collective memories; he calls for the continuation of his work to unveil the realities, legacies, and lasting impacts of the transcontinental railroad project and other manifestations of imperialism and settler-colonialism in the Great Plains and beyond.