As monuments connected to legacies of white supremacy and colonial expansion topple, how might we reconsider memorial and commemoration practices in and of Early America? The papers gathered here explore critical questions about the pervasive commemoration of agents of colonization, genocide, and enslavement throughout our public landscape. This panel proceeds in conversation with scholars such as Lisa Blee and Jean O Brien who have explored the “the twin impulses to sanitize and grapple with the meaning of settler-colonialism;” Adam Barker’s notion of the “deathscapes of settler colonialism;” and Christine DeLucia’s vibrant “memory lands.” Together they explore the tension between commemorative practices that respond and contest the legacies of “epistemic violence” and “epistemic oppression” (extending the frameworks that Gayatri Spivak, Kristie Dotson, and Reviel Netz have articulated) and those that are performances of resistance and examples of indigenous survivance in contested memoryscapes that extend from New England to the U.S. Southwest.

Each panelist will give a focused 15-minute presentation followed by discussion period of 15-20 minutes.

In “Settler Mourning, Indigenous History, and The Logan Elm,” Mark Alan Mattes revisits the figure commonly known as Logan (Tachnechdorus), prominent in accounts of Dunmore’s War (1774), a conflict among Virginians, Shawnee Indians, and Haudenosaunee migrants to the Ohio Valley. Rather than turning to settler accounts of Logan and his speech, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Mattes decolonizes such accounts by centering a once-living memorial sitting on Shawnee land near Circleville, Ohio: The Logan Elm. Mattes begins with a consideration of settler apocrypha involving the site of Logan’s speech including historical society publications, commemoration speeches, and the built environment surrounding The Logan Elm. Then, he proceeds to show how Indigenous people have challenged the genocidal implications of these settler stories through Native American contributions to the memorialization of The Logan Elm in the nineteenth-century, as well as through twenty-first century interpretations by members of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation that forge an ongoing Indigenous history of survivance.

Ben Bascom attends to the striving of local figures like Timothy Dexter who positioned himself in proximity to figures of nascent power and constructed legitimacy by erecting a series of wooden statues of himself and figures like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams on his Newburyport, MA lawn. In “Early U.S. Federalism in Drag: Timothy Dexter’s Queer Monuments” Bacom draws upon drag’s insights on performance and campiness—its aesthetics of imitation and parody—to consider how this self-declared aristocrat (“Lord” Dexter as he called himself), seeks inclusion within a Federalist New England by inserting himself into the emerging pantheon of the new nation’s figures of cultural significance. Ultimately, he argues these statues function as a fantasy projection, a type of queer effort at connecting to the emergent iconography of the U.S. that ends up emphasizing the the fraught legitimacy that continually frayed and contested the early U.S. power.

In “Bathed by the Blood”: Necro-Settler Colonialism at the Alamo, Chaney Hill explores necro-settler colonialism, turning to Adam Barker’s notion of necro-settlements, to attend to the continued displacement and erasure of Indigenous claims to land at deathscapes like the Alamo through the internment of white settler bodies. Hill traces the necro-settler colonial histories of the Alamo, paying particular attention to the memorialization of the Republic of Texas; to the dual re-emergence of white supremacist ideologies and confederate monuments in the 1920s and 30s; and to current protests surrounding the relocation of the Alamo Cenotaph. Hill contends that the Alamo Cenotaph, while not a Confederate monument per se, is nonetheless aligned with post-Reconstruction efforts to realign racial politics to antebellum values.

In “The Sleeping Historian: Static Violence and Settler Epistemes,” Jonathan Beecher Field thinks with Reviel Netz and through his notion of “static violence” detailed in Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. Field argues that a Vermont state historical marker commemorating the 1780 Royalton Raid constitutes a continuing act of static epistemic violence, one that causes pain in its ongoing narration of a version of events that contrasts unwarranted Indigenous violence against vulnerable settler innocence. Fields as two versions of the question “how did the marker get there?” The first concerns the material form and location of the sign, and second, the text of the marker and the narrative it presents and authorizes. His paper offers a close reading of the text of the 1958 sign, deploying scholarship from an indigenous perspective to engage the ideological work of this sign and the many signs like it.