Land Acts: Land’s Agency and Environmental Justice in Literature, Law, and History in the Native Northeast

This talk traces land’s agency across Mohegan and Haudenosaunee narratives, and compares the Indigenous relationships therein to land’s commodification in colonial legislation and literature. Professor Kyle Keeler explains how land structures Haudenosaunee and Mohegan legislation and society in creation story and law, and he offers how land’s agency appears and is contorted into foundational colonial legislation in the Mason Land Case of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Native recognition of land’s agency and its influence on Native writing and legislation is representative of “Literature of Landed Resistance,” a framework for understanding how Native authors situate their relationship to and understanding of land to resist settler confinement and removal. Understanding land as a member of society and legislator centers land throughout American history and shows land’s role as an agent and an influence in community- and nation-building.

In understanding land and Native thought as foundational to U.S. legal precedent through “literature of landed resistance,” contemporary Supreme Court cases utilizing the philosophy of the Mason Case must be reexamined, because land has influenced centuries of U.S. legal history and structured contemporary law, and Native sovereignties must come to be seen as stronger than previously recognized by the courts. We must see, and accept, land as an acting member of society, especially as it pertains to Native thought, Native writing, and colonial histories that continue to harm human/nonhuman relations, and Native sovereignties and land’s agency in cultural and legal production come to be seen as non-negotiable.

This presentation is part of the series Woven Together: Braiding Indigenous and Western Sciences for Shared Solutions to Environmental Challenges. Co-sponsored by the Hanson Center for Inclusive STEM Education, the Indigenous Studies Program, the Engineering Division, and the Engineering Studies Program.