Native spaces, settler colonial landscapes, and the culture of Manifest Destiny.: Conceptual geographies and the transformation of Ohio Country, 1701-1850.

摘要

This dissertation attempts to do three things: give conceptual form to the Native landscape of Ohio Country during the eighteenth century, delineate the role of the landscape in the struggle for Ohio Country, and examine the relationship between the conceptual transformation of Ohio Country and the development of American settler colonialism. How, for example, did Native societies' connections with this place inform lived experience and social praxis? How did American settlers and national leaders re-imagine this space, and what role did their perceptions of Natives and Native landscapes play in those re-imaginings? Finally, how did Americans naturalize their own landscapes and appropriate those of previous inhabitants? With such questions in mind, I attempt to reveal some of the cognitive layers that have informed man-land relationships in Ohio Country and to chart the conceptual geographies and imagined spaces that integrated American settler colonialism, American national identity, and American national space in the early republic. Thus, this research looks at how people have imagined, constructed, interacted with, and related to the Ohio landscape as a cultural space. In doing so, it highlights the interconnectedness of cultural knowledge and cultural space, of stories and places, and between the past and the present. Taking an ethnohistorical methodological approach and looking at linguistic, oral, and geographical evidence as well as traditional historical documents, such as travel narratives, newspapers, and government records, I argue that the Ohio landscape is a layered palimpsest of cultural narratives and that its recent settler colonial history must be understood within the context of both physical and conceptual landscape transformation. Beginning with the Native geographies that informed this world during much of the eighteenth century, it traces how Native societies organized and ultimately defended their social worlds through the organization of space. Then it turns to the intellectual relationship between the Ohio landscape and the emerging settler colonial ideology and national mission of the new United States in order to show that naturalizing and indigenizing discourses were central to both the discursive dislodging of a Native past and the indigenizing construction of a national present.