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

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

As agents of ecological transformation, more-than-human actors represent a range of roles in a diversity of Indigenous pasts. Scholarship from Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) illustrates how Native peoples recognize many animals as extensions of their own kin networks. Environmental histories of colonization, by contrast, demonstrate the destructive, even extractive capacities of certain species introduced to Indigenous lands. The field of animal studies, for its part, encourages scholars to speculate upon equal significance of human and non-human subsistence and how their convergence, collision, and coalescence has prompted unique ecological transformations. Positioned at the intersections of these interventions, this panel aims to generate interdisciplinary discussion on how historians might reckon with the role of more-than-human actors in Indigenous and colonial pasts and reassess their representation in the present. Several thousand generations ago, a shared dependency on salt brought native species – mastodon, elk, buffalo, and deer – and Native peoples into contact, coalescence, and conflict with one another at salt resources; their interactions with salt and with one another created unique ecological precedents that shaped the eventual settler colonization of salt resources. Elsewhere, like the continental northeast, non-indigenous species – namely swine and cattle – exacted unfamiliar damage upon Indigenous environments; through the eighteenth century, Wabanaki people responded to the incursions of colonial livestock and people alike by designating territorial invaders as non-kin who shared responsibility for the invasion and degradation of the Wabanaki’s Dawnland. Colonization proved more permanently destructive in the Great Lakes, where the commercialization of sturgeon and construction of dams continues to disrupt relations among Anishinaabe peoples, sturgeon, and the environments upon which both depend. Collectively, these papers illustrate how the foregrounding of Indigenous ecologies, methods, and materials might allow environmental historians to more effectively explain how colonial extraction implicates more-than-human actors and to speculate new intellectual and ecological futures.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Beasts and Burdens: Inter-Species Violence in the Dawnland - Camden Robert Elliott, Harvard University

• Traces of Dependency: Locating the History of Salt Through Multispecies Movement and Indigenous Studies Methods - Annabel G LaBrecque, University of California, Berkeley

• Securing a Future for Lake Sturgeon: Anishinaabe Histories of the Great Lakes - Natasha Myhal, The Ohio State University

Chair

• James Rice, Tufts University

Discussant

• Nancy Langston, Michigan Technological University