The North Woods: An Environmental History from the Pleistocene to the Pyrocene
This dissertation rests on a simple premise: that colonization both produced environmental change and that those changes simultaneously contributed to colonization. Focusing on the forested region of the western Great Lakes known as the North Woods, this dissertation argues that examining colonization through environmental change further complicates understandings of colonial processes. Settler colonialism is not a one-size-fits-all paradigm, but academics have treated it as a panacea to explain all forms of colonization. This dissertation does not refute that settler colonialism occurred: it did, frequently. However, settler colonialism according to its telltale process of removal and replacement did not occur in the North Woods. Instead, colonial processes in the North Woods might better be characterized as settler extractivism. Extractive industries beginning in the fur trade informed the shape of Euro-American presence in the region for centuries, long before any large-scale white settlement efforts began. Furthermore, while Native peoples in the North Woods lost the majority of their lands, more than three dozen Native reservations remain scattered in the region. Large-scale white settlement also never occurred in the region as successfully as the United States might have hoped, largely due to difficulties in agriculture, resulting in a very low population density for much of the region. Whether furs, minerals, logging, or even modern day recreation, Euro-Americans have developed ways to extract wealth from the region, almost always at the expense of its Indigenous inhabitants. The North Woods today are heavily forested, yet those forested environments are far different from one century ago, and different still from those that existed two centuries ago. Settler extractivism thus provides the framework to examine both long-term environmental change, and how that environmental change slowly worked to undermine Indigenous economic autonomy until by the early-twentieth century North Woods Natives found themselves as proletarians incorporated into a capitalist economy.
American history, Environmental studies, Indigenous studies, Forests, Fur Trade, Great Lakes, Indigenous, Logging, Mining
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