ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Earth’s Many Layers: Stratigraphic Maps and the Battle for the Black Hills

• In Event: Stratigraphy, Deep Time, and the Making of Geological Knowledge 3

English Abstract

Since the 1803 journey of Lewis and Clark, the United States government had been sending out explorers to gather information about and map the trans-Mississippi West. After the Civil War, with an eye toward claiming the land both for what it could produce and for what they might extract from its depths, the backers of surveys of the western United States relied heavily on paleontologists. In this paper, I contend that when paleontologists made stratigraphic maps of western North America, they divorced fossils and rocks from the specific places that held them, laying the foundation for an argument against the cultural specificity of place and Indigenous claims to their land and its contents.

With the thin lines of their pencils, stratigraphic map makers marked what new industrialists and an empowered federal government might extract from earlier moments in the land’s history. These maps separated the earth’s past from its present moment except for where it might provide profit in the form of coal, metals, or fossils. Reading stratigraphic maps of the Black Hills and Great Plains alongside Oglala author James LaPointe’s retelling of the story of the Big Race, which he first heard growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation at the end of the nineteenth century, I challenge the story told by those stratigraphic maps, presenting a narrative of the land and its layers that is anything but flat, extractive, or generalizable.

Author

• Samantha Wagner, New York University