Fallen Forests

Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women's Environmental Writing, 1781-1924

Karen Kilcup

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780820345000, 9780820332864
• eBook ISBN: 9780820345710
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In 1844, Lydia Sigourney asserted, "Man's warfare on the trees is terrible." Like Sigourney many American women of her day engaged with such issues as sustainability, resource wars, globalization, voluntary simplicity, Christian ecology, and environmental justice. Illuminating the foundations for contemporary women's environmental writing, Fallen Forests shows how their nineteenth-century predecessors marshaled powerful affective, ethical, and spiritual resources to chastise, educate, and motivate readers to engage in positive social change.

Fallen Forests contributes to scholarship in American women's writing, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminist rhetoric, expanding the literary, historical, and theoretical grounds for some of today's most pressing environmental debates. Karen L. Kilcup rejects prior critical emphases on sentimentalism to show how women writers have drawn on their literary emotional intelligence to raise readers' consciousness about social and environmental issues. She also critiques ecocriticism's idealizing tendency, which has elided women's complicity in agendas that depart from today's environmental orthodoxies.

Unlike previous ecocritical works, Fallen Forests includes marginalized texts by African American, Native American, Mexican American, working-class, and non-Protestant women. Kilcup also enlarges ecocriticism's genre foundations, showing how Cherokee oratory, travel writing, slave narrative, diary, polemic, sketches, novels, poetry, and exposé intervene in important environmental debates.

Chapter 1
“We planted, tended, and harvested our corn”

Native Mothers, Resource Wars, and Conversion Narratives

Many spacious tracts of meadowland are confined by these rugged hills [of Carolina], burdened with grass six feet high. Other of these valleys are replenished with brooks and rivulets of clear water, whose banks are covered with spacious tracts of canes, which retaining their leaves year round, are an excellent food for horses and cattle.

— MARK CATESBY, “Of the Soil of Carolina”

Brother, I am in hopes my Brothers and the Beloved men near the water side will heare from me. … I am in hopes if you rightly consider it that woman is the mother of All — and that woman Does not pull Children out of Trees or Stumps nor out of old Logs, but out of their Bodies, so that they ought to mind what a woman says, and look upon her as a mother — and I have taken the privelage to Speak to you as my own children, and the same as if you had sucked my Breast.

— KATTEUHA, The Beloved Woman of Chota, 8 September 1787

WITH ITS SPACIOUS MEADOWS and clear water, the New World was a place worth fighting over. Seeking peaceful interactions between Cherokees and Euramericans, the pointed and affecting letter by the unnamed “Katteuha,” or Beloved Woman, to Benjamin Franklin reveals the material and gendered ground on which interethnic resource conflicts were too often fought. Emerging from an ethical framework in which “woman is the mother of All,” Katteuha highlights positively valued, embodied resources for human survival while she attempts to restore interpersonal relations to a more appropriate standard of respectful attentiveness and complementarity.

Peace and world security expert Michael T. Klare observes that “[h]uman history has been marked by a long series of resource wars — stretching all the way back to the earliest agrarian civilizations.” The women whose work I explore in this chapter — Nancy Ward (Nanye-hi; Cherokee), Margaret (Peggy) Ann Scott (Cherokee), unnamed Cherokee women, Lydia Sigourney, and Mary Jemison (Seneca) — illuminate this observation’s significance in the early American national context. Klare’s Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict concisely defines the recently formulated title term: “conflict over vital materials.”¹ Like other contemporary commentators — including geographers, political scientists, sociologists, and military historians — Klare addresses current struggles for oil and water that preoccupy nation-states, but he also discusses internal wars over gold, diamonds, minerals, and timber.² Recently Al Gedicks has pointed toward different kinds of struggles: contemporary conflicts between Native Americans and multinational corporations reflecting what he calls “resource colonialism.”³

These commentators’ descriptions resonate in colonial America, where resource competition accelerated with Europeans’ arrival. We should consider the treaty-based, juridical confiscation of Native lands — with their various extractable natural resources, including gold and timber — as resource warfare. Between about 1781 and 1840, Ward and her successors articulated varying, and gendered, concepts of nature as they intervened in America’s early resource wars. In this chapter, I investigate how these women’s spiritual and religious perspectives affected their activism, how that activism took shape, and how effectively their rhetoric helped resolve conflicts. Emotional intelligence features centrally in their approaches and in what their environmental writing accomplished.⁴ As the introduction stresses, such affective virtuosity incorporates not only emotions — such as sympathy, anger, fear, and frustration — but also ethical appeals, a rhetorical mode traditionally denied to women in Western societies.⁵ The often-synergistic rhetoric of motherhood and spirituality, even when disparate social contexts define each term differently, has particular potential to be politically efficacious.

Some of the writers I examine below have enjoyed considerable scholarly attention, but that attention has focused principally on historical concerns (with the Cherokee women) or on issues of gender or ethnicity (both the Cherokee women and Sigourney).⁶ To those conversations I add a dimension of rhetorical analysis: although the Cherokee women’s speeches and some of Sigourney’s texts parallel traditional rhetorical forms — nonfiction prose intended to persuade — Sigourney’s poetry and Jemison’s as-told-to narrative also perform persuasively. In an uneven but coherent manner responding to ongoing resource wars conducted against indigenous peoples, women in early America were engaged in projects we should now recognize as environmental. They were particularly concerned with environmental justice.⁷

We need briefly to define environmental justice. In 1991 the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit outlined seventeen principles of environmental justice. The preamble to these principles cites the group’s intention “to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities” and affirms “our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth.” The principles prioritize “mutual respect” among peoples; the “ethical, balanced and responsible uses of land and renewable resources in the interest of a sustainable planet for humans and other living things”; and the “fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples.”⁸ These principles have clear continuities with Ward’s and her cohort’s concerns.

As they acknowledge the relationship among the exploitation of Native peoples, women, and the environment, the women rhetors whose work I analyze below anticipate contemporary environmental justice and ecofeminist analyses. All, including the white women, recognized that environmental justice involved not only moral, spiritual, or economic issues but also legal and political ones relating specifically to Indian sovereignty. Ward’s oratory is the only example among this group that explicitly shares contemporary ecofeminists’ concern with nonhuman nature, but all the Native writers express affirmative connections between women and nature, providing a useful critique of contemporary theorists’ depreciation of those connections as unsophisticated and “essentialized.” Showing how Western ecofeminists’ obsession with essentialism represents a conceptually blinkered distraction from efforts to gain environmental agency, I explain how the writers here model powerful gendered affective, ethical, and spiritual appeals, especially when collectively authored, that should undergird contemporary activists’ efforts to build and sustain alliances for progressive environmental work.

By connecting Indian women to environmental justice concerns, I am not conjuring the “Ecological Indian,” a romanticized and homogenized image that elides the complex, concrete, and diverse “histories, spiritual traditions, and cosmologies” of the many indigenous nations that inhabited early America.⁹ We should not idealize the women discussed below: for example, many elite Cherokee women were slaveholders; Jemison participated in Seneca land cessions; Sigourney and Scott supported Indian assimilation, including religious conversion; and Christian missionaries’ destructive roles in forced assimilation have been well documented. Moreover, Native American and Euramerican women participated in the same project, anti-removal efforts, for different reasons and with different rationales. Though their rhetoric sometimes appears cognate, its resonances sometimes differ radically; in particular, their grasp of women’s relationship to nature and the environment, and even their definitions of nature and women, sometimes diverged. Nevertheless, alliances were possible despite the challenge of incompatible social and ethical systems. If we wish to understand the interlocking forces that shaped early America’s gendered and racialized approach to the environment, examining these writers provides some key perspectives on such topics as the meaning of nature, womanhood, land ownership and resource conflicts, and environmental justice.

Julie Sze emphasizes that contemporary environmental justice is concerned not only with public policy but also with “issues of ideology and representation.”¹⁰ This assertion has historical reverberations: how these precursors express themselves is often as important as what they say, and so I explore how they worked — what genres and language they used and what affective stances they assumed. Their forms, which include petitions, letters, poems, and conduct writing, suggest that today’s readers interested in environmental writing should look well beyond traditional Thoreauvian nature writing — individualistic, reflective, first-person narrative. However, their diverse genres share an oral component — literal for the Cherokee women, figurative in Sigourney, and mediated in Jemison. This orality enhances the impression of an authorial presence that insists on auditors’ ethical responsibility to act. Often privileging community over individual well-being, these writers resist the emerging “American” obsession with profit and the ethic of exploitation that too frequently accompanies it.¹¹

Despite their differences, Ward, Scott, their cohort, and Sigourney engaged in what we might today call consciousness-raising: all revealed the ongoing resource wars between the early American government and indigenous peoples, all attempted to change minds and behavior, and (with varying emphases and levels of explicitness) all linked gender to these resource wars.¹² Their rhetorical and political strategies arguing for Native agency or sovereignty augured contemporary movements for environmental justice.

“Our cry is all for peace”:
Cherokee Women, Gold, and Land Ethics

At a meeting with U.S. treaty commissioners in 1785, the Cherokee Beloved Woman Nancy Ward observed, “I am fond of hearing that there is a peace, and I hope that you have now taken us by the hand in friendship. … I look on you and the red people as my children.” Resource wars framed this period, of which Ward states, “I have seen much trouble,” concluding, “we hope the chain of friendship will never more be broke.”¹³ Notwithstanding energetic efforts by her and many other American women, friendship and peace remained hopes rather than realities.

While many male writers — among them William Bartram, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Timothy Dwight — often prioritized cataloguing and admiring the natural world, many of their female counterparts, both individually and in groups, sought to preserve Native American lands, sovereignty, and people. These women faced a mountainous rhetorical problem: how to convince the American public and political leaders that removal was wrong. In a dominant society that distinguished between humans and nature, to adequately contend that Indians were people — not animals, not part of nature — advocates had to characterize them as civilized.¹⁴ As Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee) relates, “To the frontiersman, Indians were a dangerous and fierce presence. … Hordes of white settlers grew eager to ‘conquer the wilderness’ and ‘civilize’ the land. They were anxious to grab up all the salt licks, deposits of gold, stands of old-growth timber, rivers and streams, seas of lush prairie grass, beaver pelts, and buffalo hides. They wished to own the land. … Nothing and no one — especially ‘heathen savages’ — would stand in their way.”¹⁵

Even white women, as events proved.

Mankiller’s observations anticipate and concretize Philippe Le Billon’s framework for interpreting recent conflicts: “Resources have specific historic, geographic, and social qualities participating in shaping the patterns of conflicts and violences.”¹⁶ For early Europeans, land, its products, and its inhabitants all stood for means of survival and sources of economic wealth. The very concepts of ownership and resources imply a worldview: the Earth and its inhabitants are objectified and available for consumption.¹⁷ With its image of mother’s milk, Katteuha’s letter — addressing Benjamin Franklin but certainly encompassing a wider audience — critiques and transforms this perspective. For traditional Native Americans, such objectification of resources problematically eclipses the natural world’s spiritual and psychological valences. Indeed, in the Indian polities of early America, distinctions between the spiritual and the physical would have been puzzling if not incomprehensible, because the land and its inhabitants, from the four-footed (animals) to the standing people (trees) formed the web of life. Unlike in Euramerican society, where association with the body linked women to the animal world, such a connection with materiality and embodiment did not mean degradation but, as Katteuha suggests, empowerment.¹⁸ Maintaining this web required careful attention to balance, as well as equal respect for all its elements. For the Cherokee, the language of gender, spirituality, and sovereignty were interconnected.

The Christian ecological theologians Whitney A. Bauman, Richard R. Bohannon II, and Kevin J. O’Brien argue that “[r]eligions do not simply appear … on their own … but evolve in conversation with other social and natural forces. Religions and other cultural systems, in turn, shape how human beings choose to think about, relate to, and treat the natural world.”¹⁹ To assess nineteenth-century women writers’ responses to resource conflict, we need to sketch the spiritual systems from which their work emerged and to which it responded. Yet any such outline necessitates caution in the application that follows, because in the period I describe below both sets of traditional beliefs were rapidly changing, as some Christians reinterpreted patriarchal mandates and as elite Cherokees converted to Christianity and Euramerican lifeways.

The Christian creation story, which establishes the relationships between humans and nonhuman nature and between men and women, possesses special significance for our discussion. The King James translation of Genesis 1:26 declares, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Grounding the Texts: An Introduction
• Chapter 1 “We planted, tended, and harvested our corn”: Native Mothers, Resource Wars, and Conversion Narratives
• Chapter 2 “Such Progress in Civilization”: Forest Life and Mushroom Growth, East, West, and South
• Chapter 3 Golden Hands: Weaving America
• Chapter 4 Gilt-Edged or “Beautifully Unadorned”: Fashioning Feelings
• Chapter 5 Domestic and National Moralities: Justice in the West
• After Words: Toward Common Ground
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index