2025 Theses Doctoral

Memory Traces: Indigenous Thought in Early American Natural Histories

Hulett, Benjamin

This dissertation closely reads 18th and 19th century natural histories to demonstrate how explicit and implicit encounters between Western and Indigenous thought shaped Early American representations of ecological relation. Previous scholarship has both celebrated natural histories for advancing Enlightenment thought and criticized them for their role in the colonization of the Americas.

My project argues that these approaches to the genre still overlook the substantive influence of Indigenous thought on how Western naturalists represented plants, animals, and other humans. Drawing upon post-structuralist theory, an interdisciplinary array of scholarship in the environmental humanities and Native and Indigenous studies, as well as nonacademic works by Indigenous writers, speakers, and storytellers, I argue that “memory traces” — typically imperceptible remnants — of Indigenous thought become legible if we superpose Western and Indigenous epistemologies when reading natural histories.