Description:

KELLY WISECUP: English, Northwestern University

"Indigenizing Botany: Colonial Science and Mohegan Medicine in Eighteenth-Century North America"

Description: Colony botany and colonial expansion went hand in hand in eighteenth-century British America: colonial botanists collected specimens and materials on expeditions that also aimed to survey Native American lands and trade networks. This talk shows that botanical practices and textual forms provided a foundation on which early American men of science and politics could imagine what Philadelphia botanist John Bartram called Indigenous “dependence” on British American political and economic systems. Yet Indigenous medical practitioners employed their knowledge to posit a different set of relations, one that foregrounded connections among place, bodies, and plants. I place Mohegan minister Samson Occom’s 1754 “List of Herbs and Roots” against colonial botanical projects in order to rethink histories of botany as well as the relationship between herbals and colonialism.

Bio: Kelly Wisecup (Ph.D. University of Maryland, College Park) specializes in Native American literatures, early American literature and culture, and medicine and literature in the Atlantic world. She is the author of Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and of “Good News from New England” by Edward Winslow: A Scholarly Edition (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). Her articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Early American Studies, Atlantic Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, Literature and Medicine, and The Southern Literary Journal.

 reception to follow