Glacier Erasure: Stories, Speculation, Surveys, and Soil Science in Potawatomi Homelands

• In Event: Uneasy Partners: Evaluating the Relationships between Science, Environments, and the State

Abstract

People of the Potawatomi nation have been impactful stewards of their homelands for centuries. However, soil science, geology, geomorphology, geography, and other historical sciences have often left Potawatomi people out of the stories they tell about Potawatomi homelands. At times, scientists and engineers involved in these fields reinforce U.S. settler colonial ideas that Native nations and their land use practices could simply be erased and replaced. Throughout the 19th century land surveyors and land speculators in the U.S. Midwest worked to extract private capital from the process of treatymaking between the U.S. government and the Potawatomi by regarding the land as in a state of nature. In the early 20th century, soil scientists, funded through land-grant schools, conducted soil surveys not only to gain general knowledge but specifically to help settler landowners’ productivity and profitability. Publishers of Midwestern local history in the same era were equally happy to include glaciers and settler farmers in their accounts while skimming over the deep, specific histories of the Potawatomi Nation. Taking the Potawatomi nation’s land use practices over time into account is an important corrective to Earth science that has been conducted under U.S. sovereignty.

Author

• David Bontrager Horst Lehman, Westminster College