The next A19 seminar, which will take place on Friday 20 February from 2.00 to 4.00 PM (Central European Time), will be dedicated to David Cusick (c. 1780-1840), the Tuscarora artist and historian, and author of Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1828). We are very pleased to welcome two speakers who will each present a paper on Cusick’s work: Christen Mucher (Smith College) and Sheila Byers (Oxford University).

Christen Mucher (Smith College), “LandBack and Literary History: David Cusick’s Deep Time Stories”

The LandBack movement that has been gaining momentum in the 21st century has roots as deep as colonialism. This talk discusses how the early nineteenth-century Tuscarora historian David Cusick gives us a sense of land and LandBack as an important analytic for reading early as well as current-day Native writers.

Sheila Byers (Oxford University), “Becoming Many Small Mosquitoes: Temporal Ecology in David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations”

In his 1828 Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, the Tuscarora writer, historian, and artist David Cusick relates an incident in which a giant mosquito invades a Haudenosaunee community living near the shores of Lake Onondaga. After days of biting and torturing the community, the mosquito is defeated and its blood transforms into a swarm of small mosquitoes. This transformation means that the mosquito, perhaps paradoxically in a story of defeat, remains in the region near lake, and its blood, which was originally the blood of the people it bit, continues to circulate within the community and the natural environment in which they live. In this talk, I argue that Cusick’s mosquito swarm illustrates a specific version of ecology, one that incorporates Haudenosaunee philosophies of place-thought and a theory of time that, while it can be structured linearly, allows for the presence of multiple, individually-focused chronologies made concurrent by their intersections in space. I explore how this temporal ecology makes a persuasive case for Indigenous claims to North American land and how it participates in a larger early American milieu of ecological thinking.

The session will be held in person, at the Bibliothèque de l’UFR d’études anglophones at Sorbonne Université, and online. A Zoom link is already available on the event webpage: https://a19.hypotheses.org/3161