In the twentieth century, settler states have operated through science. At the same time, the field of American bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science. It has done so by upholding the settler logics of the sciences that it claimed to hold to account. This chapter explores how the imperial logic of American bioethics works – through its concepts, practices, and imperceptions. To do so, the chapter follows Carolyn Matthews, an everyday American with a rich “vernacular archive” and apt work experiences, across three medical sites and over three postwar decades. It tells Carolyn’s story in two registers – setting Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974, when the US Congress passed laws for the treatment of human subjects, alongside Carolyn’s moral recounting of those work experiences in the late 1970s. Carolyn’s case offers insight into how the vocabulary and framework of modern American bioethics embeds a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. The aim of this critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform anticolonial practices – in science, history, and transformative bioethics.

This framing chapter focuses on the nation’s founding and the salience of inequality and race that is baked into our founding documents. It also discusses the concept of democracy that prevailed at the time of the founding and why it represented a radical departure from the past influences of Anglo and French political thought. It introduces the concept of multiple political traditions within American democracy.

In the post-Reconstruction USA, biopolitical technologies of governmentality became central to the project of racial control. As the USA moved from a settler colonial and slave-owning nation to a settler colonial and nation of overseas colonies, a politics of violence was followed by a pedagogy of recovery, particularly in education and health, through which the lives of racialized populations could be “improved.” The salubrious racial management of populations through discourses of health in the Philippines, Guam, Hawai’I, and Indian reservations emphasized distinctions between clean and unclean bodies, hygienic and unhygienic behaviors, and ultimately moral and immoral lifestyles. However, the technologies of care in the USA occupation of Japan during its reverse course phase (1948–1952) illustrate how racial–cultural difference could be refashioned for geopolitical purposes. While early in the occupation the Japanese were Orientalized as conformist, obsequious, and feudalist, Brides Schools for wives of American GIs exemplified how the creation of Japanese wives as perfectly assimilable subjects functioned to demonstrate American racial democracy during the Cold War.

This chapter offers the account of an underexplored subgenre of Indigenous writing, namely, the Native American essay. Historically, these essays bore witness to individual and collective loss and injustice and told the history of murder, dispossession, forced reeducation, exploitation, and mistreatment that characterizes the encounter with European colonizers. In their essays, Indigenous people have proclaimed their existence and continuance and argued for sovereignty. Many of these essays appear embedded in the forms of stories, sermons, appeals, ethnographies, autobiographies, journals, and periodicals, as well as in scholarship. Their style and subject matter are wide ranging, with reflections on the natural world, identity, tradition, self-governance, and spirituality. The contributions of important Indigenous essayists like Samson Occom, E. Pauline Johnson, N. Scott Momaday, Charles Eastman, Winona LaDuke, and Leslie Marmon Silko show the breadth, depth, and beauty of Indigenous writing from the eighteenth century to today.

While new modernist scholars are generally keen to recover and integrate the tradition’s marginalized voices, its implements for doing so remain relatively crude. As some critics have argued, the “pluralizing of modernisms” is not sufficient without a more granular accounting of the mutually constitutive developments of race/racism and modernism writ large. More supple instruments for reading race into modernism have thus acknowledged settler colonialism and racial capitalism as the underlying, instigating features of both modernity as a historical process and modernism as the intellectual and cultural responses to inhabiting its conditions and institutions. Summoning Indigeneity into modernism’s operations frameworks forces us to read against the typical grain of alterity, resistance, or transcendence. This chapter surveys the state of such field-shifting projects while arguing for further innovations that would more radically place – and deconstruct – the idea of “Indigeneity” within the crucible of modernism.

This chapter traces a history of Native American short stories, from oral narratives to written short stories infused with retellings of Indigenous oral tales reflecting Native values: close relationships with language, land, human and non-human communities, ancestors, and the sacred. Rather than focus on defining the short story as a genre, Native writers tend to focus on story itself, especially the centrality, power, and life-shaping capacities of story. The earliest short stories were embedded in autobiographies, ethnographies, sermons, etc., but became more standalone stories over time. The long tradition of stories in a primarily realist mode has been joined by speculative fiction, science fiction, horror stories, children’s stories, Young Adult stories, and graphic narratives. Native short stories, including interlinked story cycles, critique settler-colonialism, document historical trauma, present Indigenous alternatives to imposed historical narratives, and offer new possibilities for Native continuance.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) concluded that Canada had committed “cultural genocide” in government-supported residential schools that aimed to forcibly assimilate First Nations peoples since the nineteenth century. The TRC’s finding of cultural genocide in Canada can inform our understanding of American Indian boarding schools in the U.S. given the similarities and connections between the two systems. Both countries founded their schools with the aim of achieving total assimilation, or cultural genocide. Both, however, did much more than forcibly assimilate Indigenous youth. At the root of U.S. and Canadian Indigenous education project rests a genocidal truth: they may have committed all of the genocidal crimes enumerated in the UNGC. School administrators held people year after year with full knowledge of how lethal the schools were and an explicit plan to commit cultural genocide. This chapter demonstrates how scholars of the American Indian boarding schools can learn from the TRC, consider how we may evaluate the schools under the UNGC, and ultimately conduct additional data-gathering in order to reach a better understanding of what happened in these institutions.

The Native peoples of North America long possessed a discourse critiquing the violent white invasion of their homelands. This Indigenous conscious of genocide—the belief that whites wanted Indian land and were willing to kill large numbers of Native men, women, and children in order to obtain it—profoundly shaped how Native nations responded in encounters with the new United States from the late eighteenth century onwards. Even in those cases where Indigenous peoples avoided the most extreme forms of violence, the awareness that they could become the targets of genocide still guided Native behavior. The asymmetrical nature of this violence demonstrates the need to stop labeling the nineteenth-century conflicts between the U.S. and Native nations as “Indian wars” and instead to embrace a language that stresses that these confrontations were unilateral colonial invasions of Indigenous homelands. Recentering historical analysis on the Indigenous conscious of genocide also demands greater attention to Native recordkeeping and perspectives, rather than privileging the intentions of the white perpetrators of genocide.

The 1636-1637 Pequot War and its aftermath were formative events in the making of New England and North America. The region’s first major colonial war eliminated the Pequots as a geopolitical power, opened southern New England to English domination, nearly annihilated the Pequots, and helped to establish patterns of extreme violence against Native Americans that shaped much of the continent north of Mexico. Unsurprisingly, few events in colonial North America have produced such prolonged and unresolved historical debate. This chapter will summarize the ongoing modern Pequot genocide debate, narrate the cataclysm in detail, provide quantitative estimates of its death toll, discuss dispersal and enslavement as a genocidal strategy, reevaluate colonists’ culpability, reconsider pre-genocide Pequot population estimates, and explain how this catastrophe constituted genocide under the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.

Surveillance has always been at the heart of America’s ongoing effort to subordinate and control the first people of the land. Contrary to the mythology about scattered bands of roaming nomads in the forest, America was at least as densely populated as Europe at the time of first contact with Europeans. Charles Mann and others have successfully narrowed the population estimate of North America to somewhere around 90 million people at the time of Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean.1 The capital city of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlan, was three times larger than the largest city in all of Europe, which was London. Getting the land out of native hands was no small task, and a lot of blood and treasure was expended on the effort then. America’s native nations still control substantial land and resources; and much blood and treasure are still spent today in a changed but obviously ongoing effort to take what’s left. This chapter explores how surveillance was used to subjugate and colonize the Indigenous populations of North America.

This chapter examines representations of American land and labour in the late nineteenth century as a complex engagement with the georgic mode. US writers used georgic representations of economic, technological and imperial expansion to promote widely divergent visions of the ideal citizen and worker, from the virtuous husbandman of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) to the bean-hoeing intellectual of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). Although the georgic mode represents themes central to US cultural history, it is not merely a celebration of industry and labour; like Virgil’s Georgics, which holds out the promise of progress in a fallen world but shows the human and environmental costs of the hard work it seems to promote, US adaptations of georgic illuminate the destructive aspect of agricultural labour and the moral ambiguities of imperial expansion and racialized labour.

This chapter discusses how migration and trade as historical sociocultural processes have contributed to language spread and language contact situations in Latin America. It explores how language contact situations in Latin America have been dynamically created and changed by the movement of peoples and exchange of things and ideas through space and time, focusing on three kinds of linguistic outcomes: language spread, the emergence of multilingualism, and the development of contact languages. The discussion is framed by an interdisciplinary framework, focusing on the internal and external histories of indigenous languages of Latin America, from the initial peopling of the New World up to contemporary situations of language contact.

This chapter explores the formative role that political oratory played in the literary culture of the early republic, with a particular focus on the statesman's address. American literature bears a strong relationship to oral forms and styles. In the period covered by this volume, the interplay of oral and written language shapes the works of Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, while oratory figures importantly in such notable novels as Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), Wieland (1798), and Last of the Mohicans (1826). Political speech was far more central to the literary culture of the day than was the novel, with oratorical culture dominating English education until after the Civil War. “The Statesman's Address” considers the influence of Native American oratory and evangelical preaching on a genre that came into its own in the Revolutionary period and gained importance as the contours of the new republic were defined and contested.

This essay reflects on how Indigenous communities have maintained their own literary canons, often outside the mechanisms that literary scholars tend to associate with canonicity: large institutional archives, formal publishing and republishing, placement in major anthologies and college syllabi. The essay argues that Indigenous canonicity is not a static tradition from which texts can be either lost or added; it is not a privatized or extractive business. Rather, it is a collective, contributive process in which tribal members share in the multiple functions of editing, archiving, writing, reading, interpreting, and publishing. These community-based processes and conversations turn up a wealth of essays, poems, recipes, and histories that haven’t typically attracted the attention of settler teachers, publishers, or collecting institutions – perhaps because they were not written for settlers. The Indigenous literary histories that Indigenous communities remember and cherish, instead, document and imagine who the people are, where they come from, and where they are going. The essay concludes with a reflection on Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks’s notion of “the gathering place” – referring to any collective exercise of Indigenous cultural authority and exchange – as a model of Indigenous writing and canon making.

This essay focuses on Sarah Winnemucca’s development of a school for the Paiutes that would avoid the assimilationist violence often associated with white-run schools for Native Americans in the nineteenth century. Following her book Life Among the Piutes into this history gives us a way of thinking about Native American literature more broadly, and the histories that led to its emergence, its necessity, in a nation determined to control the voices and destinies of Native Americans across the country. To become educated at Winnemucca’s school is not to “become white.” A combination of Northern Paiute traditions and Elizabeth Peabody’s feminist-minded educational philosophy, the Peabody Institute was a powerful counterpoint to the U.S. boarding schools of the time. Winnemucca’s interpretation of her school is apparent in several features: the centrality of the mother figure; the emphasis on Native American languages, traditions, and cultures; and the role of the Native American woman – the interpreter – as educator. In these terms, the Native American woman determines the direction of her school, a truly anti-colonial move. As Life Among the Piutes and the nineteenth-century newspaper articles and letters teach us, then, there was an alternative to the colonialist boarding school.