Unsettled Ground: Indigenous Prophecy, Geological Fantasy, and the New Madrid Earthquakes (2022)
This essay explores the differing relations to land, time, and history—human and planetary—that organized responses to the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811–12 and that now characterize responses to the Anthropocene. Indigenous and settler accounts connected the earthquakes to a catastrophic rupture in time, but they located that catastrophe differently. For the US, the disaster was seismic, a geological revelation of human powerlessness. Federal intervention sought to restore the region to the future-oriented time of the nation, while Romantic history and geological fantasy supplemented the inscription of settler-national time on the land by identifying the "Indian" with cultural and geological pasts. Indigenous interpretations connected the quakes to the ongoing rupture that colonialism instantiated. Circulated through the pan-Indigenous revival, the polychronicity of anticolonial assessments of the quakes drew on the energy of prophecy, reflecting what Mark Rifkin identifies as prophecy's ability to gather other-than-chronological possibilities as they interwove the earth's past and the land's present state to make Indigenous futures possible again. Recent approaches to the Anthropocene replicate this division, alternately perpetuating the necropolitics of geological fantasy and embracing a reparative adaptation of what Kyle Powys Whyte (Citizen Potawatomi) describes as "kinship time."
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
SELBY HEARTH;
(2024)
Geologists as Colonial Scouts: The Rogers Expedition to Otavi and Tsumeb, Namibia, 1892–1895
(/isis/citation/CBB799232063/)
Book
Feldman, Jay;
(2005)
When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes
(/isis/citation/CBB000550008/)
Thesis
James A. Puckett;
(2022)
A Science of Literature: Ethnology and the Collection of Indigenous Oral Traditions in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB845920115/)
Book
John Ryan Fischer;
(2017)
Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai'i
(/isis/citation/CBB872040578/)
Article
Willmott, Cory;
(2014)
Beavers and Sheep: Visual Appearance and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Algonquian-Anglo Relations
(/isis/citation/CBB001201576/)
Book
Walker, Charles F.;
(2008)
Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath
(/isis/citation/CBB001031478/)
Book
Valencius, Conevery Bolton;
(2013)
The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes
(/isis/citation/CBB001452063/)
Article
Will Wright;
(October 2017)
Geophysical Agency in the Anthropocene: Engineering a Road and River to Rocky Mountain National Park
(/isis/citation/CBB907621877/)
Chapter
Dean, Dennis R.;
(2009)
Benjamin Franklin and Geology
(/isis/citation/CBB001021048/)
Book
Cara New Daggett;
(2019)
The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work
(/isis/citation/CBB510402598/)
Article
Anduaga, Aitor;
(2014)
Earthquake Building Overseas: Military Engineers, Cyclonic-Seismic Affinity and the Spanish Dominion in the Philippines, 1860--1898
(/isis/citation/CBB001450025/)
Article
Eugenio Luciano;
Elena Zanoni;
(2023)
Antonio Stoppani's ‘Anthropozoic’ in the context of the Anthropocene
(/isis/citation/CBB612636846/)
Book
Aitor Anduaga;
(2018)
Cyclones and Earthquakes: The Jesuits, Prediction, Trade, and Spanish Dominion in Cuba and the Philippines, 1850-1898
(/isis/citation/CBB859546360/)
Article
Snježana Markušić;
Ines Ivančić;
(2020)
History of seismology in Croatia
(/isis/citation/CBB926959413/)
Article
Kölbl-Ebert, Martina;
(2002)
Augenzeugen der Gebirgsbildung---Das chilenische Erdbeben von 1822 als wissenschaftshistorischer Kriminalfall
(/isis/citation/CBB000630989/)
Article
Coen, Deborah R.;
(2012)
Introduction: Witness to Disaster: Comparative Histories of Earthquake Science and Response
(/isis/citation/CBB001230583/)
Thesis
Tyler David Morgenstern;
(2021)
Colonial Recursion and Decolonial Maneuver in the Cybernetic Diaspora
(/isis/citation/CBB527576201/)
Book
Devon A. Mihesuah;
Elizabeth Hoover;
(2019)
Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health
(/isis/citation/CBB526625043/)
Article
Reetta Humalajoki;
(2020)
Tearing down the ‘buckskin curtain’: Domestic policy-making and Indigenous intellectuals in the Cold War United States and Canada
(/isis/citation/CBB190948130/)
Article
Leandra Swanner;
(2017)
Instruments of Science or Conquest? Neocolonialism and Modern American Astronomy
(/isis/citation/CBB540792818/)
Be the first to comment!