Terra Nullius is my March 2019 column in Locus magazine; it explores the commonalities between the people who claim ownership over the things they use to make new creative works and the settler colonialists who arrived in various “new worlds” and declared them to be empty, erasing the people who were already there as a prelude to genocide.

I was inspired by the story of Aloha Poke, in which a white dude from Chicago secured a trademark for his “Aloha Poke” midwestern restaurants, then threatened Hawai’ians who used “aloha” in the names of their restaurants (and later, by the Dutch grifter who claimed a patent on the preparation of teff, an Ethiopian staple grain that has been cultivated and refined for about 7,000 years).

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