Unsettling Thoreau
Native Americans, Settler Colonialism, and the Power of Place
Henry David Thoreau’s life-long fascination with Native Americans is widely known and a recurring topic of interest, and it is also a source of modern debate. This is a figure who both had a deep interest in Native American history and culture and was seen by many of his contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as “more like an Indian” than his white neighbors. At the same time, Thoreau did little to protest the systematic dispossession of Indigenous people across the country in his lifetime. John J. Kucich charges into this contradiction, considering how Thoreau could demonstrate deep respect for Native American beliefs on one hand and remain largely silent about their genocide, actively happening throughout his life, on the other. Thoreau’s long study of Native peoples, as reflected in so much of his writing, allowed him to glimpse an Indigenous worldview, but it never fully freed him from the blind spots of settler colonialism.
Drawing on Indigenous studies and critiques of settler colonialism, as well as new materialist approaches that illustrate Thoreau’s radical reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world, Unsettling Thoreau explores the stakes of Thoreau’s effort to live mindfully and ethically in place when living alongside, or replacing marginalized peoples. By examining the whole scope of his writings, including the unpublished Indian Notebooks, and placing them alongside Native writers and communities in and beyond New England, this book gauges Thoreau’s effort to use Indigenous knowledge to reimagine a settler colonial world, without removing him from its trappings.
‘Kucich carefully builds an argument attentive to both the evolution of Thoreau’s understanding of Native American topics and the limits of his willingness to engage with living, breathing Indigenous North Americans and advocate for their cultural and political sovereignty. Many have written on what Kucich refers to as Thoreau’s ‘Indian Problem’ but none (in my opinion) have done so with such breadth and with clear decolonizing aims.’—Laura Mielke, author of Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States
‘I learned a great deal from this book, which will become a touchstone for future considerations of Thoreau’s relationship to Indigenous people.’—Joshua David Bellin, author of Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824-1932
Thoreau beyond Borders
New International Essays on America's Most Famous Nature Writer
Edited by François Specq, Laura Dassow Walls, and Julien Nègre
