At the end of the term, with final exams just a few days away, I find myself feverishly writing. Conference papers. Dissertation chapters. An article for a forthcoming edited volume. This blog post. Even in the face of lots of grading in the next few days, I’m doing a lot of writing, and all of this writing has me thinking about the words I use and their power, specifically their power to erase.
In my current project, I’m spending quite a bit of time writing about a group of immigrants who made their way onto the U.S. frontier during the nineteenth century in order to build new communities there. They confidently trekked into forests in Michigan or prairies in Iowa assured of their ability to find space where they could put down roots and make a way for themselves.
As I read through the letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles by these folks, I am struck by some of the words they use and power of those words to hide the effects of their colonial expansion on the prairie. Words like “unclaimed” or “uninhabited” pepper these sources as immigrants talk about their efforts to build new communities in rural regions of the Midwest during the nineteenth century. I continue to find examples where new arrivals eagerly wrote home or advertised in the community paper to tell wondrous tales of all of the land that was just waiting for someone to come and develop it.
When I am dealing with these sources, I’m particularly struck by the power of language to transform these landscapes into something that they most certainly were not. When European immigrants and American boosters described these regions as “unclaimed” and “uninhabited,” they evoked an image of an empty expanse waiting for someone to appear and take advantage of its bounty.
This, of course, is a complete mischaracterization of these lands. For millennia indigenous people lived in the forests and prairies that these new settlers claimed as their own. These were tribal lands that were deeply important to the men and women who lived on them. Native Americans thrived on these lands, took ownership of them, and had an interest in their continued ability to live there.
Most settlers knew this. Even prospective immigrants in rural villages in Europe knew that Native Americans lived on the American frontier. As I read through early letters or newspaper articles—in both English and Dutch—they often mention the nearby Native American tribes. At times, these early settlers noted their fear of the land’s former inhabitants, but at others, they just mentioned indigenous people in passing, as if they were just part of the scenery. In either case, immigrants and migrants alike continued to deploy language like “unoccupied” and “empty” in order to describe the land. By doing so, they ignored and, in their own minds, erased the claims that indigenous people had to the land.
The language itself in these nineteenth-century sources does serious work to create a vision of millions of acres of land awaiting settlement. In these sources, the culture and claims of native peoples disappear as a result. Settlers simultaneously dehumanize the previous and current inhabitants while erasing the their histories. With the specific words they chose to use, settlers justified their own efforts to take the land for themselves and aided in the government’s efforts to push indigenous people out of their ancestral homes.
This is not a particularly novel reading of these documents or the settler colonialism that took place on the frontier in the nineteenth century. In my work, though, it has been valuable to wrestle with the significant work that these words accomplish. This is especially worthwhile because words like “unclaimed” or “uninhabited” may initially seem more benign than terms like “uncivilized” or “barbarian.” Ultimately, though, they do very similar work.
As I’ve been writing about this settlement process, I’ve also reflected quite a bit on the power and pervasiveness of these words not only the in historical sources but also in the writing of historians who study this settlement process. At first, words like “unclaimed,” “unsettled,” or “uninhabited” may seem like appropriate ways to describe land taken by immigrants and migrants on the U.S. frontier in the nineteenth century but to use them uncritically risks perpetuating the erasure that began in the nineteenth century.
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