Delivered at the annual American Ethnological Society Conference in Washington, D.C. in April 2016 In the late summer of 1779, Continental Army troops under Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton invaded the territory of the Seneca Indians in upstate New York with the express purpose of ‘punishing’ them for their attacks against American frontier settlements … Continue reading ‘Our Own Ground to Rest Upon’: Seneca Indians, the 1779 Sullivan Expedition, and the Reconstruction of Indigenous Homelands through Agriculture after Forced Migrations
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‘I Ain’t the Same’: Anti-Heroism and Violence in 21st Century Westerns
Delivered at the annual PCA/ACA National Conference in Seattle, Washington in March 2016 For much of the early twentieth century, violence in Westerns was differentiated along gendered and racial lines to construct an image of nineteenth-century frontiersmen as paragons of American exceptionalist excellence that defended white ‘civilization’ from non-white ‘savagery’ through selective acts of ‘noble’ … Continue reading ‘I Ain’t the Same’: Anti-Heroism and Violence in 21st Century Westerns
‘Civilization or Death to All Savages’: Soldiers, Indians, and Congress’s War on the Revolutionary Frontier
Delivered at the annual Society for Military History Conference in Kansas City, Missouri in April 2014 US Indian policies during the Revolutionary War were in large part characterized by efforts at cultural conversion. Some historians have noted the practical considerations of such policies.[1] While significant, however, it is also important to apprehend that the Indian … Continue reading ‘Civilization or Death to All Savages’: Soldiers, Indians, and Congress’s War on the Revolutionary Frontier
Nathan Wuertenberg 