Unsettling Thoreau

Native Americans, Settler Colonialism, and the Power of Place

John J. Kucich

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781625348340, 9781625348357
• eBook ISBN: 9781685751067
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Finalist for the 2025 New England Society Book Awards

Henry David Thoreau's life-long fascination with Native Americans is widely known and a recurring topic of interest, and it is also a source of modern debate. This is a figure who both had a deep interest in Native American history and culture and was seen by many of his contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as "more like an Indian" than his white neighbors. At the same time, Thoreau did little to protest the systematic dispossession of Indigenous people across the country in his lifetime. John J. Kucich charges into this contradiction, considering how Thoreau could demonstrate deep respect for Native American beliefs on one hand and remain largely silent about their genocide, actively happening throughout his life, on the other. Thoreau's long study of Native peoples, as reflected in so much of his writing, allowed him to glimpse an Indigenous worldview, but it never fully freed him from the blind spots of settler colonialism.

Drawing on Indigenous studies and critiques of settler colonialism, as well as new materialist approaches that illustrate Thoreau's radical reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world, Unsettling Thoreau explores the stakes of Thoreau's effort to live mindfully and ethically in place when living alongside, or replacing marginalized peoples. By examining the whole scope of his writings, including the unpublished Indian Notebooks, and placing them alongside Native writers and communities in and beyond New England, this book gauges Thoreau's effort to use Indigenous knowledge to reimagine a settler colonial world, without removing him from its trappings.

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Illustrations
• Preface: Reading Thoreau on Native Ground
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Thoreau’s Indian Problem
• Chapter 1: Ghosts of Musketaquid - Playing Indian, Local History, and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
• Chapter 2: Savagism and Its Discontents - The Indian Notebooks
• Chapter 3: Becoming Native - Walden, “Walking,” and the Poetry of Place
• Chapter 4: Indians in Massachusetts - Cape Cod, Colonialism, and Wampanoag Revitalization
• Chapter 5: Lost in the Maine Woods - Henry Thoreau, Joseph Nicolar, and the Penobscot World
• Chapter 6: Succession - Wild Fruits, The Dispersion of Seeds, and Thoreau’s Indian Afterlife
• Notes
• Index