Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1984. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: leaves 382-411.

<p>The Grand River and its tributaries drain an area of over 2,000 square miles, in south-western Ontario between Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario. The area includes the present-day counties of Brant and Waterloo, and the adjoining parts of Wellington, Oxford, Wentworth, Haldimand, and Halton. It is one of the most fertile regions in Ontario, with a variety of soil types, mostly clay loams and a relatively mild climate. In Brant county, about 11 miles south of the town of Brantford, lies the township of Tuscarora, the Reserve of the Six Nations Indians, and all that remains of their original land grant, which extended almost the whole length of the Grand River. The type of agriculture and land use in Tuscarora presents a striking contrast to the conditions in the surrounding townships, which have been settled by non-Indian people. Large areas of the Reserve lie unused and are under either rough grass, scrub, or woodland, and little land is being used for agriculture. This study is an enquiry into the poverty of the Reserve, as reflected in the land use. The enquiry has three aims. First, the history of settlement and land use on the Reserve since the end of the eighteenth century is considered, to discover whether the present day poverty has its roots in the past. Secondly, a comparison is made between the trends in agricultural development in Tuscarora and those in the neighbouring townships of Oneida, to see whether these conditions have persisted since the Reserve was first established. Thirdly, an investigation is made of soil conditions as a contributing factor to the present day poverty of the Reserve.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

Late Ordovician (Cincinnatian) strata of the central Appalachians provide an opportunity to study the effects of both tectonics and eustasy within a foreland-basin setting. The Juniata Formation consists of red sandstones, siltstones, and shales that were deposited as part of an extensive siliciclastic basin-fill that resulted from the Taconic Orogeny. This study attempts to resolve some of the questions regarding tectonic and eustatic influences on sedimentation by (1) reconstructing the paleogeographic environment of the Juniata Formation and (2) examining the stratigraphic architecture of the Juniata Formation. A combination of both outcrop and subsurface data was analyzed. Seven facies were identified in this study, including: (1) "proto-vertisols", (2) red shale/mudstone, (3) siltstone/silty mudstone with interbedded sandstones, (4) quartz arenite and sublithic arenite, (5) argillaceous sandstone, (6) hummocky-bedded sandstones and siltstones, and (7) lithic sandstones and conglomerates. These facies are grouped into four facies associations (A–D), which are interpreted to be deposited from the inner shelf to the upper shoreface. Isopach and paleocurrent data suggest the shoreline was oriented NE–SW and detrital sediment was dispersed west and southwest across the basin. Tectonics controlled the 2nd-Order basin-fill pattern, and these patterns vary along the strike of the basin. Eustatic changes are expressed in two 3rd-Order sequences that were identified in the formation, and possibly in the 4th-Order (?) cycles of Facies Association A. The Ordovician–Silurian boundary is expressed as an unconformity throughout the study area, and along-strike variations in the structural setting of the basin were important in its development. / Master of Science

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Writers of early American texts frequently express astonishment at the abundance of swarming things found in nature, from rustling clouds of insects to ponds teeming with fish to forests of countless trees. They report feeling overwhelmed, fascinated, and threatened by the dynamic, formless grouping of the swarm, in which the distinction between part and whole is lost in a blur of motion. In this dissertation, I trace these experiences of swarming across religious tracts, natural histories, philosophy texts, and historical fiction to argue that the swarm is crucial for understanding early American ways of relating to the environment. Scholars of the colonial period have long maintained that settlers viewed the American continent as a vast and empty land, available for settlement and resource extraction, and that the settler mind sought to manage the perceived chaos of their new surroundings through the application of European systems of thought and order. I argue, however, that the experience of the swarm indicates another kind of environmental relation, one in which the viewer and the natural world become ecologically entangled. In this entanglement, settlers found their preconceived ideas challenged, forcing them to revise or generate anew their theories of the world. While these ecological experiences of the natural world appear in texts by the settler writers Jonathan Edwards, Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, William Bartram, and James Fenimore Cooper, the ideas that develop through the swarm are influenced by or overlap with the epistemologies of the Native American peoples who inhabited the lands these settlers occupied. The project also addresses Indigenous modes of environmental relation and philosophies through Haudenosaunee cosmologies, Maskoke origins stories, and the work of the Tuscarora writer David Cusick. Overall, this dissertation offers an epistemological history of the colonial period that not only revises long- accepted characterizations of the settler mindset but that also takes seriously the histories of Indigenous philosophies as early American intellectual movements. In detailing experiences in which the mind and the natural world are not in fact separate entities, my work presents alternative modes of environmental relation and offers suggestions to today’s urgent need to rethink our orientation toward the natural world.