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.

Chapter 1 explores how American settler colonialism in the nineteenth century utilized “nature” and the synonymous “native” in contradictory ways: celebrating the wilderness and then cutting it down, mourning lost “natives” (both people and species) while also seeing the succession of new Euro-American settlers as an expression of the natural order. The chapter traces the countervailing themes of “native” species in three sketch writers: John James Audubon, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Simon Pokagon. Each one exposes an emergent sense of ecological relation that comes from their perception of being close to nature. Contextualizing these sketches within the American picturesque tradition as well as other popular visual technologies of the time, the chapter examines how what is called their “species of seeing” hews to both Enlightenment traditions of objectivity while also skewing toward more aesthetic senses of mediation between the “native” artist-scientist and wild “other.” In their writings, it becomes possible for the sketch to become an apparatus for constituting “species” as more mutable entities. Various species, whether the swallow, the passenger pigeon, or even the Native American, become figures through which biological life becomes understood as dispersed into its geographical migrations.