Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women's Environmental Writing, 1781-1924

1. “We planted, tended, and harvested our corn”: Native Mothers, Resource Wars, and Conversion Narratives

21 Chapter 1 “We planted, tended, and harvested our corn” Native Mothers, Resource Wars, and Conversion Narratives Many spacious tracts of meadowland are confined by these rugged hills [of Carolina], burdened with grass six feet high. Other of these valleys are replenished with brooks and rivulets of clear water, whose banks are covered with spacious tracts of canes, which retaining their leaves year round, are an excellent food for horses and cattle. — mark catesby, “Of the Soil of Carolina” Brother, I am in hopes my Brothers and the Beloved men near the water side will heare from me. . . . I am in hopes if you rightly consider it that woman is the mother of All—and that woman Does not pull Children out of Trees or Stumps nor out of old Logs, but out of their Bodies, so that they ought to mind what a woman says, and look upon her as a mother—and I have taken the privelage to Speak to you as my own children, and the same as if you had sucked my Breast. — katteuha, The Beloved Woman of Chota, 8 September 1787 with its spacious meadows and clear water, the New World was a place worth fighting over. Seeking peaceful interactions between Cherokees and Euramericans, the pointed and affecting letter by the unnamed “Katteuha,” or Beloved Woman, to Benjamin Franklin reveals the material and gendered ground on which interethnic resource conflicts were too often fought. Emerging from an ethical framework in which “woman is the mother of All,” Katteuha highlights positively valued, embodied resources for human survival while she attempts to restore interpersonal relations to a more appropriate standard of respectful attentiveness and complementarity. 22 chap ter one Peace and world security expert Michael T. Klare observes that “[h]uman history has been marked by a long series of resource wars—stretching all the way back to the earliest agrarian civilizations.” The women whose work I explore in this chapter—Nancy Ward (Nanye-hi; Cherokee), Margaret (Peggy) Ann Scott (Cherokee), unnamed Cherokee women, Lydia Sigourney , and Mary Jemison (Seneca)—illuminate this observation’s significance in the early American national context. Klare’s Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict concisely defines the recently formulated title term: “conflict over vital materials.”¹ Like other contemporary commentators —including geographers, political scientists, sociologists, and military historians—Klare addresses current struggles for oil and water that preoccupy nation-states, but he also discusses internal wars over gold, diamonds, minerals, and timber.² Recently Al Gedicks has pointed toward different kinds of struggles: contemporary conflicts between Native Americans and multinational corporations reflecting what he calls “resource colonialism.”³ These commentators’ descriptions resonate in colonial America, where resource competition accelerated with Europeans’ arrival. We should consider the treaty-based, juridical confiscation of Native lands—with their various extractable natural resources, including gold and timber—as resource warfare. Between about 1781 and 1840, Ward and her successors articulated varying, and gendered, concepts of nature as they intervened in America’s early resource wars. In this chapter, I investigate how these women’s spiritual and religious perspectives affected their activism, how that activism took shape, and how effectively their rhetoric helped resolve conflicts. Emotional intelligence features centrally in their approaches and in what their environmental writing accomplished.⁴ As the introduction stresses, such affective virtuosity incorporates not only emotions—such as sympathy, anger, fear, and frustration—but also ethical appeals, a rhetorical mode traditionally denied to women in Western societies.⁵ The oftensynergistic rhetoric of motherhood and spirituality, even when disparate social contexts define each term differently, has particular potential to be politically efficacious. Some of the writers I examine below have enjoyed considerable scholarly attention, but that attention has focused principally on historical concerns (with the Cherokee women) or on issues of gender or ethnicity (both the Cherokee women and Sigourney).⁶ To those conversations I add a dimension of rhetorical analysis: although the Cherokee women’s speeches and “We planted, tended, and harvested” 23 some of Sigourney’s texts parallel traditional rhetorical forms—nonfiction prose intended to persuade—Sigourney’s poetry and Jemison’s as-told-to narrative also perform persuasively. In an uneven but coherent manner responding to ongoing resource wars conducted against indigenous peoples, women in early America were engaged in projects we should now recognize as environmental. They were particularly concerned with environmental justice.⁷ We need briefly to de...