Alicia Puglionesi - In Whose Ruins : Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire

A history of the present. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States

In Whose Ruins

Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire

Alicia Puglionesi

then the wide-spread ruins of our cloud-cappd towers, of our solemn temples, and of our magnificent cities, will, like the works of which we have treated, become the subject of curious research and elaborate investigation.

DeWitt Clinton, The Iroquois: Address Delivered before the New York Historical Society, Dec. 6, 1811

W here does power come from and where does it go? The United States has long been haunted by premonitions of decline, by memento mori of fallen empires real and imagined. Thinking that ancient Indigenous earthworks were the ruins of a lost white civilization akin to the America of his day, the poet William Cullen Bryant mused on that disciplined and populous race: The gopher mines the ground / Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone; / Allsave the piles of earth that hold their bones. Bryants buoyant 1832 ode to US expansionism was tempered by these backward glances, notes of unease connected with the restless murmurs that many people sensed arising from the land itself. Was there a limit to empire? Was the promise of America as a second creationa world born anew into the ingenious hands of its European discoverershiding something more sinister?

Much inspirational literature prepared young people to mine this second creation for profit, tracing an arc of history in which all of nature had ripened to fall into their grasp. Millions of years before the earth was prepared for the habitation of man, wrote the author of How to Achieve Success, natures great laboratory was at work, for the accomplishment of a PURPOSE to meet the demands of civilization. Intending that civilization to run on steam, oil, and electrical power, God formed store-houses of inexhaustible wealth, only waiting for the necessities of man to unlock their doors and bear away the treasure. Its no coincidence that Charles H. Kent, the author of these stirring lines, was a land agent by profession. The first step to success was acquiring land, enclosing natures storehouses under private title. The rest, according to Kent, was as simple as turning a key in a lock.

From these rhetorical heights of entitlement, there was still the ever-present possibility of a fall. Yes, the world is advancing, thundered Kent; we must keep pace with the advance, or be crushed beneath its ponderous wheels. While Bryant looked backward at the vanished mound-building civilization with confidence that the United States would inherit and exceed its accomplishments, Kent looked forward and saw that there would be no resting place. The only way to elude failure was to outrun itthus the need for How to Achieve Success and countless similar titles cascading from the nineteenth centurys lightning-fast steam-powered presses. In a somewhat circular manner, the sources of power opened up by American enterprise fueled perpetual anxiety about their exhaustion.

A century later, we might recognize Kents sanctified quest for inexhaustible wealth and its shadow, the fear of losing power, at the core of many present-day political convulsions. White supremacy, neofascism, and climate change denial each in related ways assert that unlimited strength and resources are a birthright that loyal Americans must defend against creeping threats. Lodged deep under the callus of American exceptionalism are the complex, brutal mechanics of the second creation, the human choices that, without the self-propelling cover of divine sanction, would appear to merit restitution. Rather than engaging with the problem of justice inherent in honest accountings of American history, the imperative to keep pace with the advance conjures a darkly fantasized future where the ruins of US civilization whisper in restless murmurs to some alien poet. There can be no question of how current Americans, caught between denial and fatalism, might decide to use power differently.

Perhaps this seems like a trite psychological diagnosis when the stakes are immediate and deathly real. But the anxiety of origins is a motive force, a gnawing worm whose trail guides the American imagination. If the nations power came from someone else and will go to someone else, holding on to it requires not just a physical grip (from my cold dead hands, cries patriot Charlton Heston) but a narrative grasp of what the nation is and where it came from. Controlling the past and the story of origins is essential to controlling the future.

Theres an alluring poetry about tracing powerful forces to their origins. Rivers were a special focus of nineteenth-century scientific expeditions seeking their remotest sources. Such mappings laid the groundwork for colonization in North and South America, Africa, and Asia, but they also sought a spiritual mastery of the terrain, contemplated the essence of power itself in the humble springs from which great rivers cascaded. British explorers raced to the headwaters of the Nile, so obsessed with finding its source that the victors persisted until ulcers ate through their feet. This part isnt poetic; neither is the fact that scores of African workers died hauling around great men such as Livingstone and Stanley. Yet the origin quest was celebrated in Europe as part of mans heroic struggle to wrest secret knowledge from nature and bring the light of Christianity to the places Europeans shaded dark. Science and faith are not just ornaments for empiresthey produce the belief that these empires are necessary and good.

Decades before the famous Livingstone expedition, the American Henry Rowe Schoolcraft set out to find the source of the mighty Mississippi River. It lay somewhere west of Lake Superior, a land that settlers regarded as wilderness. Schoolcraft had failed at various pursuits in his early life and, like so many others, sought redemption on the frontier. Rigid, self-promoting, and sometimes egomaniacal, he saw the work that lay ahead for American empiretaking Indigenous land and disciplining Indigenous peopleand threw in his lot with this business.

First in 1820, and again in 1832, Schoolcraft got himself hired as a scientist on military expeditions in present-day Minnesota, promising to find the Mississippis source and map it for the United States. The second time, becoming somewhat desperate, he split off from the main party with an Indian guide. Ozaawindib, or Yellow Head, identified in reports as the leader of a nearby Ojibwe village, agreed to bring Schoolcraft and his military escort to the requested place. The deceptively simple term guiding entailed drawing up maps, finding passable routes, and wrangling men laden with bulky supplies across difficult terrain. They slogged up a series of tributaries to a lake, where Schoolcraft planted an American flag and called it a day with his feet mercifully intact. Claiming the privilege of first discovery, he named the lake Itasca.

In Schoolcrafts reports we get one kind of origin quest: a white explorer locates and names the source of a river. Yet the real story of that event is how settlers, through narrative, attempted to remake the land and people for white consumption. In the years that followed, Schoolcraft kept changing his strategy, as though uncertain if the trick had worked. Ozaawindib told Schoolcraft the name of the lake was Omashkoozo-Zaagaigan, or Elk Lake, widely used not only by Ojibwe who frequented the place, but by white traders and missionaries. Schoolcraft wanted a new name to fit the occasion, something more heroic that would appeal to readers back east. At first, it seemed that he had made up Itasca entirely from his imagination, splicing together the Latin words