Speculative Settler Silvics: Ecologies of Nationhood in Wisconsin

• In Event: Deep Cuts: Forests and United States History

Abstract

The College of Menominee Nation – Sustainable Development Institute places Menominee autochthony in the center of their sustainable development model. Considering Menominee autochthony and the important role that forest management plays for their collective continuance requires that scholarship and practice also examine how at how claims to settler autochthony inhere to and are advanced by forestry. The evolution of forest management for Menominee Nation and the State of Wisconsin offers a comparative look at speculating on the future of a nation through silviculture.
Wisconsin’s northern forests have long been sites of speculation and resource exploitation. Treaties between the U.S. and Native Nations of this region were explicitly aimed at acquiring timber resources. Such treaties legally empowered lumbering interests to extract massive amounts of timber from the newly forming state that propelled the development. The advent of the railroad in Northern Wisconsin in the 1870s rendered the full wealth of timber sources exploitable.
By the mid and late 1800s, Americans realized that to continue over-exploiting and recklessly damaging forests would undermine the settler project. It would mean that the settlers could not stay. Implementing forestry could therefore address two dialectically related processes: namely, the desire to extinguish Indigenous relationships to their homelands, while simultaneously establishing meaningful ecological relationships for settlers to uphold their own claims to autochthony.
Forestry in America was not only about the material conditions that allow settlers to remain on Indigenous lands – forestry was also concerned with aspects of identity that assert their belonging into the future. Racial and cultural superiority, as instituted and maintained through forestry entitle settlers to maintain a presence on this land. The purpose that forestry would serve in the United States was to build a settler state that is based on a fundamental rootedness in the soil, reified through the actual practices of forestry.

Author

• Ryan Hellenbrand, University of Wisconsin-Madison