Opening the Archive: War Trophies and the "Alternative to Extinction"

How can close-reading within underexplored military archives re-situate our historical understanding of the ways shifting stories of cultural genocide become absorbed within America’s red record of migration, sanctuary, and... [ view full abstract ]

How can close-reading within underexplored military archives re-situate our historical understanding of the ways shifting stories of cultural genocide become absorbed within America’s red record of migration, sanctuary, and extinction? Using rare battle-field journals, maps, officer correspondence, and indigenous ledger art from West Point’s Special Collections, I first trace how 19th century military “scientists” learned to deliberately exterminate buffalo populations in order to “chastise” indigenous peoples. I then trace the stated “logic” of such slaughter as it deforms and displaces within three representative novels: Cooper’s The Pioneers (1821), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), and Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing (1960). The panel CFP asks the following: “How do institutions that used violence – slow and fast—to constrain particular subjects register themselves in and upon the texts available to, produced by, or representative of such people? How might these “underground” experiences of place inform current understandings of environmental justice, including the equation of environmental justice with racial justice?” In an attempt to address these questions I examine how indigenous “war trophies” in West Point’s special collections—especially ledger art—both respond to the historically dominant Army narrative but also speak to the way 19^th century extinctions might teach us now, within the context of our current, global, trans-species precarity.  To conclude I turn to both Paul Kingsnorth's Dark Mountain Movement and to Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope: Ethics in the face of Cultural Devastation for some theoretical grounding, and I consider two linked questions: How can knowing humans are now geological agents help us resist the twin threats of: 1. Romantic complacency about the present political climate, and 2. A “nostalgia for a future” that has already become impossible?