Deep Cuts: Forests and United States History

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

Forests hold a powerful place in United States history. Long associated as places of darkness, residences of the supernatural, and untamed wildernesses, for much of United States history, forests represented something to be overcome in the minds of settlers. Yet, the manifest destiny and utilitarianism associated with forests is tied to settler colonialism, and not everyone regarded forests as something to overcome or conquer. To many Native people, forests were essential to their economic, cultural, and spiritual livelihoods; for African Americans, forests represented complex spaces of racial terror, toil, refuge, and escape from various forms of bondage to land and labor throughout time. Control of forests and forest resources, as well as their (mis)management, therefore produces interesting intersections between race, class, and the environment. The papers in this session focus on how forests and access to forest resources provided the impetus for the interrelated goals of industrial expansion and Indigenous dispossession; the connection to forest conservation and rationalities of nationhood and placemaking; Penobscot integration into Maine’s booming lumber industry; and the ways in which deforestation has been tethered to Black labor, land, resistance, and resilience for many African Americans over time. Together, these presentations illustrate the deep cuts that human interaction with forests and forest products have had on United States history, a history that remains very relevant today.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• The Wooden West: Industrial Capitalism and Indigenous Dispossession in the North Woods, 1825-1860 - Hayden L Nelson, University of Kansas

• Speculative Settler Silvics: Ecologies of Nationhood in Wisconsin - Ryan Hellenbrand, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Felling Native Forests, Defending Indigenous Power: Penobscot Labor and Industrial Lumbering in the 19th Century Maine Woods - Joseph P Yauch, Brandeis University

• Clear Cuts: African Americans & the Nature of Dispossession - Jasmine Kiara Brown, Michigan State University

Chair

• Michael Dockry, University of Minnesota