Traces of Dependency: Locating the History of Salt Through Multispecies Movement and Indigenous Studies Methods

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

Abstract

Inland salt resources in North America –licks and springs, brine seeps, and salt flats and lakes – have long attracted and sustained diverse populations of people and animals alike. From honey bees to now extinct megafauna, animals that require salt to survive sought out salt resources. Over time, salt-dependent animals moving to and from salt resources created pathways towards saline subsistence that allowed people to also access these life-giving resources. Hunters first resorted to salt resources to source large game such as mastodon, buffalo, elk, and deer. In their wake came Indigenous salt-makers, who manually produced and harvested salt for food preservation, cooking, and trading. For at least twelve thousand years, multiple generations of interspecies interaction at and around salt resources – particularly those in the Ohio River Valley and the western Mississippi River Valley – created intersecting networks of subsistence, instances of competition, and opportunities for coalescence. Only until the rise of unprecedentedly extractive settler salt-making industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did manual salt production cause permanent ecological damage to saline landscapes in ways that discouraged more-than-human use. Settler syntheses of salt’s history draw sharp distinctions between the mineral’s so-called extinct or “prehistoric” past and its utility to colonial commerce, settlement, and industry. But Indigenous narratives and historic experiences demonstrate the dynamism and enduring relevance of salt’s more-than-human pasts. This paper discusses how an engagement with Indigenous sources and socioecological epistemologies expands historians’ understandings of salt’s significance in North America. Preserved in the land itself and in oral histories, salt’s more-than-human past offers new opportunities to reconsider the intersections of Indigenous, environmental, and animal histories; reckon with the role of extraction in the creation and historicization of settler mineral industries; and realize possibilities for future scholarship that challenges the temporal and spatial categories underpinning contemporary colonial epistemologies and methods.

Author

• Annabel G LaBrecque, University of California, Berkeley