The 2020 Annual Convention’s location in Seattle begs a conversation about the literary culture of the region during the period that produced the city’s namesake, Suquamish and Duwamish Chief Si’ahl. This panel seeks to bring the Pacific Northwest into larger conversations about Colonial North America. Through a historicist framework, considering the literature and culture of the Northwest during its primary period of European colonization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it will also consider the theoretical implications of the Pacific Northwest as a continuously colonial space. Transatlantic scholarship of the Anglo-American eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has privileged an eastward orientation, but movement around the Pacific Rim has shaped cultural contact on the western coasts. The Lewis and Clark expedition, the first contact between the United States and the coastal nations, recorded more difficult negotiations with the Chinook of the Pacific Coast, who already had decades of trading experience with the British fur traders, than with many of the Plains tribes. By starting with Russia’s colonization of the North Pacific in the early eighteenth century, this panel will consider European imperialism as a truly global, multi-directional phenomenon.

This topic has been underexplored by scholarship, but recent work has begun to address that and bring the Pacific Northwest back into conversation with early American studies, eighteenth-century studies, and studies of imperialism and colonialism. In 2018 Claudio Saunt of the University of Georgia was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for the completion of the database and web platform “Mapping the People of Early America,” the first ever dot-density map showing the settlement and movement of African, Native, and European populations in North America between 1500 and 1790. While the project is not specific to the region, the ready availability of population density statistics of indigenous nations and tracking the earliest Spanish and Russian European contact beginning in the sixteenth century has the potential to reorient scholarship and teaching of the early Americas towards the Pacific.

Another major development in this trend was the 2019 biennial convention for the Society of Early Americanists, the main field organization, held in Eugene, Oregon, which featured two keynote presentations from scholars of the early American Pacific: Dr. Melinda Marie Jetté (Franklin Pierce University), author of At the Hearth of the Crossed Races: A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859 (Oregon State UP, 2015) and Dr. Michelle Burnham (Santa Clara University), whose Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific (forthcoming Oxford UP, 2019) is the first book-length study to consider the Pacific world in relation to early American literature and history. Dr. Burnham’s research first appeared as an article in PMLA in 2013.

This panel will bring together four twelve to fifteen-minute papers from scholars from a variety of career stages and institutional experiences to continue that conversation, especially during fifteen-minute unstructured discussion. Jeffrey Glover is Associate Professor of early American literature at Loyola University Chicago. His paper, "’Satisfied with Her Condition’: Russian Women's Captivity Narratives in the Pacific Northwest,” will look at the captivity narrative, a major genre of early American writing, through the understudied narratives of Russian-speaking women taken captive by the Makah Indians around what is today Washington State. This paper will explore the role of gender in Russian-led commercial colonization as well as how women's narratives served to critique Russian imperialism. Laura Laffrado, Professor of English at Western Washington University, is a senior scholar with a strong record of publishing on American women’s writing and Pacific Northwest regional literature. Her paper looks at two readings of colonial encounter, George Vancouver’s description of the facial modifications of Haida women in his A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean (1798), and Ella Rhoads Higginson’s critique of Vancouver in Alaska: The Great Country (1908). Laffrado juxtaposes two writers separated by a century of colonial encounter: Higginson both aligns herself with and perpetuates Vancouver’s racialized misreadings of such facial modification as mutilating and repulsive, while at the same time putting pressure on Vancouver’s conclusions by beginning to correctly read these women’s altered faces as self-authored visual texts of female privilege and agency in a literacy practice different from alphabetic script.

In keeping with the MLA’s strategic priority to collaborate on K-16 education, this panel features two scholars who combine their research interests with their work as secondary teachers. Simon Huff is a PhD student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who also teaches high school in the area of his specialization. His paper "We Showed Them the Burning Fuses": Shelekhov's Bomb and Performances of Cultural Contact in the Northern Pacific.” While John Muir depicted Alaska upon his arrival in 1879, twelve years after the United States purchased the colony from Russia, as a “pure wilderness,” Huff refocuses attention back to the late eighteenth- through mid-nineteenth-century Russian colonial project as the violent beginning cultural contact. He reads the descriptions Russian standoffs with indigenous people in the travel narratives of Gregory Shelekhov and Aleksandr Markov as rehearsals of violence, tracing a literary genealogy of early European terrorism, echoed in the recent Cliven and Ammon Bundy standoffs in Oregon and Idaho. Karoline Schaufler, a bilingual Spanish/English secondary teacher with a masters from Western Washington University will close with her paper “The Photographic Imagination: Contextualizing Ella Higginson's Portrayal of the Pacific Northwest,” on how Higginson’s poetry created a vision of the Pacific Northwest in the American imagination, arguing that this colonial framework still defines the cultural perception of the region.