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Afew years ago, I bought a house, my first venture into owning real estate. At first, I was a bit disoriented in it, adjusting to the new—and larger—dimensions of my living space.1 Having moved many times over the prior ten years, I was familiar with the perceptual and physical realignment that occurs when in a new home-place. However, I soon realized that my dysphoria was of a different kind than previously; my sensations seemed to be less about where things were in relation to my body than the ways the entire house and the lot on which it is located felt like an extension of my body. The fact that this place was my possession translated into an expansion of self—somewhere between the realms of the tactile and the imaginary —to encompass the area covered by the official property lines. I began to think that such an impression was not all that weird, given the ways personal identity under liberal modes of political economy often is conceptualized and lived as self-ownership. Extending my sense of selfhood to the land I legally owned seemed like a corollary of that ingrained way of understanding personhood. In the wake of this set of sensations, I began to consider more so than I had before the ways the macrological dynamics and institutionalized frameworks of settlement—the exertion of control by nonnatives over Native peoples and lands—give rise to certain modes of feeling.2 I started to think about how institutionalized relations of settlement, such as law and policy, help generate forms of affect through which they become imbued with a sensation of everyday certainty. In this sense, quotidian affective formations among nonnatives can be understood as normalizing settler presence, privilege, and power, taking up the terms and technologies of settler governance as something like a phenomenological surround that serves as the animating context for nonnatives’ engagement with the social environment. Introduction xv xvi Introduction My experience productively can be understood as an instantiation of what more broadly may be characterized as settler common sense. By this phrase, I mean to suggest the ways the legal and political structures that enable nonnative access to Indigenous territories come to be lived as given, as simply the unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history, and personhood. Addressing whiteness in Australia, Fiona Nicoll argues that “rather than analysing and evaluating Indigenous sovereignty claims . . . , we have a political and intellectual responsibility to analyse and evaluate the innumerable ways in which white sovereignty circumscribes and mitigates the exercise of Indigenous sovereignty” (19). My felt sense of possession of my property, such that my senses seem to extend over it as if it were contained within my individual body schema, can be conceptualized as coming at the expense of Indigenous claims to that same space, the former emerging through the phenomenological translation of the settler-state’s jurisdiction and property law as the material from which my experience of selfhood and inhabitance arises. The fact that there is not, or I do not perceive there to be, an active political struggle over the place I inhabit does not mean it and my apprehension of it somehow exist outside or beyond ongoing histories of settler–Indigenous negotiation, antagonism, and conflict. How would taking such a perspective as the lens alter how we read nineteenth-century writing in the United States? How do texts from the period register and recirculate everyday modes of settlement, drawing on them as an unacknowledged basis in developing social imaginings, geographies , and ethics not apparently related to “Indians” or processes of conquest ? What might reading such texts in this way tell us about how settler sovereignty functions as a form of quotidian perception and possibility? In The Common Pot, Lisa Brooks asks, “What happens to our view of American history when Native narratives are not just included but privileged?”: “What happens when we put Native space at the center of America rather than merely striving for inclusion of minority viewpoints or viewing Native Americans as a part of or on the periphery of America? What does the historical landscape look like when viewed through the networks of waterways and kinship in the northeast[?]” (xxxv). Building on the insights of Brooks and others with respect to the centrality of Indigenous presence and sovereignties to U.S. history, politics, and culture, and the profound alteration attending to the former brings to the latter, I want to examine how Native [18.227...

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