My dissertation argues that changes in the structures and orientations of religious thought, changes commonly understood as secularization, have provided the intellectual underpinnings for the modern exploitation and ongoing destruction of the non-human world, which extend to the underwriting the devaluing and dehumanization of marginalized groups such as Native Americans. My work makes visible the secular assumptions of ecocriticism, which tends to blame Christianity for environmental problems. It also unwittingly relies on state-legitimating constructions of religion, simplistic religious-secular binaries, and outdated, false narratives of secularization. I theorize an ecocriticism “with/out the secular” to analyze secularity in both “secular” and “religious” settings, using the category of “religious orientation,” a tacit, pre-theoretical commitment that directs ultimate trust, structures meaning as it coheres in everyday life, and shapes ontological, epistemological, ethical, and other theories. I examine how certain nineteenth-century authors, including Henry Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Pequot minister William Apess, resisted this secularization within contemporaneous American culture and Christianity because of its epistemic devaluing of the natural world. Each of these authors has been read as an exemplar of secularization, but such interpretations reveal more about the secular commitments of literary critics than about the authors and their contexts. I show instead how modern religious constructions do not necessarily correlate with the deeper religious orientation of an author or the secularity or non-secularity of his or her arguments. Dickinson’s poetry and Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers challenge dogmatic conceptions of heaven and Sabbath that are structured dualistically so as to devalue everyday earthly life. Yet they do so in non-dualistic ways that accord with a biblically rooted religious orientation of creation-fall-redemption-consummation. Their struggles against the church were against the church’s acceptance of dominant secularist ideologies that are ultimately at odds with Christianity and sustainable lifeways. Similarly, William Apess’ environmental justice work as a Native Christian against institutions dominated by white nationalist ideology demonstrate the how dualistic structures of secularity legitimate racism in conjunction with an anthropocentric that devalue the natural world.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Montana, 2008. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 3, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-106).

Since the 1992 republication of On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, most academic work on Apess has focused on his Methodism, his Native American identity, or the intersection between these two parts of his life and work. Dr. Tim Fulford is the only scholar to have written about Apess and Romanticism. In his book Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756-1830, Fulford illustrates the elegiac modes often present in the work of Apess. This thesis will examine William Apess’ Son of the Forest as an expression of early nineteenth century American Romanticism from a post-colonial standpoint. Apess uses Romantic rhetoric to define Native American identity and through that identity, argue for Native American political agency.

This paper proposes the notion that early Native American autobiographical writings from such authors as William Apess provide rich sources for understanding syncretic authors and their engagement with dominant Anglo-Christian culture. Authors like William Apess construct an understanding of what constitutes Indianness in similar and different ways to the master narratives produced for Native peoples. By studying this nonfiction, critics can gain a broader understanding of contemporary Indian fiction like that of Sherman Alexie. The similarities and differences between the strategies of these two authors reveal entrenched stereotypes lasting centuries as well as instances of bold re-signification, a re-definition of Indianness. In analyzing these instances of re-signification, this paper focuses on the performance of re-membering, the controversy of assimilation/authenticity, accessing audience, the discourse of Indians as orphans, and journeys to the metropolis.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2006. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on July 18, 2008) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

“Skeletal Testimony: Bony Biopolitics in the Early Atlantic” argues that colonial descriptions of Indigenous remains throughout the Atlantic World compose two archives: textual representations and physical remains. Because these remains explicitly demonstrate a relationship between embodied life and writing, they enable analysis of how settler writers depicted them and how Indigenous communities care for them. Emphasizing these moments through what I term “skeletal testimony,” I ask the question: what care resulted in the appearance of these remains, and how does this recognition change how we read these texts? Examining reports, histories, natural histories, speeches, poems, and engravings from New England through Suriname, I establish how colonial authors used formalized conventions of natural history empiricism and firsthand narration to represent Indigenous remains as collectible bones, often citing and reproducing one another’s work throughout the eighteenth-century Anglophone colonies. These descriptions figure remains as arising naturally and spontaneously from the landscape, enabling colonists to claim land and histories as they erase living Indigenous persons from these spaces. However, without pointed and prolonged physical care, many of these remains would have disappeared. By identifying the tension between this physical preservation and textual descriptions, I contend that these remains always attest to communities and carework, constituting a structural grounding to colonial texts, even as they attempt to obscure such relations. This emphasis in turn facilitates “narrative repatriation,” in which these narratives can be formally and thematically returned from colonial texts to ongoing histories of Indigenous life, a process most clearly demonstrated by formal reworkings and textual citations by Indigenous writers like William Apess. Because this reclaiming does not require political or historical recognition by colonial persons (a contrast to physical repatriation), narrative repatriation thus serves as a creative process of returning and belonging. Ultimately, “Skeletal Testimony” reckons with erasures—real and supposed—of colonial archives, providing a model for navigating settler colonial texts across the Atlantic World. I recalibrate how we do “early American literary studies” by insisting that we must always think about texts and bodies together, mobilizing this relationship to contribute to interdisciplinary conversations about how to respect Indigenous relations between the living and the dead.