ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Nishimura's question to discuss how Blu's Hanging's local children and animals are positioned within a history of settler colonialism and systemic oppression that leaves them exposed to physical and psychological trauma and abuse. Blu's Hanging's dogs and cats, whose portrayal moves beyond their containment in Western pethood, suffer from violence and abuse that mirror the treatment child characters experience. Human and nonhuman bodies in Blu's Hanging are vulnerable entities under constant threat of assault, disfigurement, and death. Blu's Hanging presents such a reconceptualization of human matter and moves us to consider the manifold ways in which bodies of different species are entangled by forces both within and outside of settler colonialism. The novel's pets and children ultimately ask us to consider the agency of nature as a way of understanding that human experience cannot be separated from the lives of animals.
