Haunted by Waters: A Journey through Race and Place in the American West

notes

Introduction 1. Merchant, “Shades of Darkness,” 381. 2. In her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryl Glotfelty notes, “Ecocriticism has been predominately a white movement. It will become a multi-ethnic movement when stronger connections are made between the environment and issues of social justice, and when a diversity of voices are encouraged to contribute to the discussion.” Glotfelty and Fromm, eds., Ecocriticism Reader, xxv. Recently, T. V. Reed has argued for a more expansive range of voices in the study of literary representations of the environment. See Reed, “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism .” 3. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation. 4. The general connection between human identity and place has been explored by the work of numerous cultural geographers, and many are increasingly studying the specific relation between race and place. See, for instance, Berry and Henderson , eds., Geographical Identities of Ethnic America. 5. Cronon, Changes in the Land, and Merchant, Ecological Revolutions. 6. See Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity. Marilyn Halter also discusses this racialization of ethnicity in her work on Cape Verdeans; see Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity. 7. Patricia Limerick and others have made such an argument about Mormon identity. See Limerick, “Peace Initiative.” 8. Lopez, White by Law, 17. 9. Sze, “From Environmental Justice Literature,”166. 10. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 203. 11. Freedman and Frey, eds., Autobiographical Writing across the Disciplines, 2. 12. See Limerick, “Dancing with Professors,” and Balakian, “How a Poet Writes History.” 13. Nikkei is a general term that refers to Japanese immigrants and their descendants . 14. Okihiro, “Is Yellow Black or White?” in Margins and Mainstreams. chapter 1 | The Innocence of Our Intentions 1. Clark, September 12, 1805, in Moulton, ed., Journals of Lewis and Clark. (All footnote references to Journals of Lewis and Clark are to this edition.) 2. My “reading” of the Idaho environment depends on methodologies more notes 158 notes to pages 11–16 commonly associated with cultural geography. A recent essay by historian William L. Lang outlines the application of such approaches to the field of environmental history. Lang outlines three important areas of investigation: how places have been perceived, how they have been symbolized, and how these cultural definitions have incorporated or discarded other earlier meanings of place. See Lang, “The Sense of Place and Environmental History.” 3. Whitehorse, September 5–6, 1805, Journals of Lewis and Clark. 4. Jefferson, Portable Thomas Jefferson, 309–311. 5. Ibid., 78. 6. Ibid., 94–96. 7. Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 452. 8. Linklater, Measuring America, 111. Linklater provides a detailed discussion of the evolution of America’s system of weights and measures. He also asserts that Jefferson’s reliance on a uniform system based on the square and decimal was a manifestation of Jefferson’s political philosophy. 9. Jefferson, Portable Thomas Jefferson, 309. 10. Linklater, Measuring America, 83. 11. Bedini, “Scientific Instruments of Lewis and Clark,” 93. 12. See Ronda, “A Chart in His Way.” 13. Nabokov, “Orientations from Their Side,” 242. 14. In Order upon the Land, Hildegard Binder Johnson provides a detailed history of the development of the American land surveying system and its impact upon the nation’s geography. 15. Stegner, Wolf Willow. 16. Schwantes, In Mountain Shadows, 5. 17. See Morrissey, Mental Territories. Katherine Morrissey’s text emphasizes the kind of cultural studies approach to understanding place that I deploy. Morrissey focuses on how various groups, mainly Euro-Americans, characterized this region as a distinct place. 18. Carolyn Merchant notes, “The history of spatial changes is a history of power changes.” Ecological Revolutions, 50. More specifically, in a recent essay, Mark Spence traces the environmental degradation of the Western environment, and the American government’s mistreatment of the Indian nations encountered by Lewis and Clark, to their initial journey. See “Let’s Play Lewis and Clark.” 19. Spence, “Let’s Play Lewis and Clark,” 223. 20. See Knobloch, Culture of Wilderness. Knobloch outlines the process by which agricultural production, bolstered by the rationalism of science and technology, masked the colonization of the West. She pays particular attention to the discourse of this process that defined it as natural. In her book, she does note the impact of this process upon minority peoples, and I use her ideas as a jumping-off point. 21. For instance, Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire; Ronda, Lewis and Clark among Indians; Allen, Passage through the Garden; Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery; Botkin, Our Natural History; Burroughs, Natural History of Lewis and Clark; and Ambrose, Undaunted Courage...