Beasts and Burdens: Inter-Species Violence in the Dawnland

• In Event: Histories by Hoof, Fin, and Foot: More-Than-Human Actors in Indigenous Pasts

Abstract

Abigail Noch and Josiah Hamelton were arguing about pigs. Well, to be precise they were arguing about her failure to feed the pigs and his ire over that failing. Trapped inside a tiny garrison house at the far reaches of Britain’s imperial claim, Noch was afraid of Wabanaki raiders—and so was Hamelton. In this paper, I interrogate the relationships between swine, cattle, and the Wabanaki Confederacy (an Indigenous conglomeration that includes the modern Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq peoples) throughout the Dawnland (the homeland of the Wabanaki stretching from present day Massachusetts as far North as Cape Breton and the first place the sun rises every day, at least in North America). Noch and Hamelton were both afraid of the violence the Wabanaki could visit on human and non-human alike. More specifically. By focusing on two of the most important species of settler livestock, and deploying linguistic, archival, and scientific evidence, this paper shows how newly introduced animals altered the Dawnland’s environment and how the Wabanaki in turn responded. In particular, this paper challenges the binary of human and nonhuman by taking Wabanaki cosmologies and lifeways seriously. Wabanaki people construed, in this paper’s telling, English animals and English people alike as not kin, recognizing both as interlopers in the Dawnland and waging a near century-long war to resist their incursions. Arguments about pigs, you’ll see, were seldom just over pork.

Author

• Camden Robert Elliott, Harvard University