Abstract
Industrial logging drove Native dispossession and opened opportunities for Native people to resist colonialism in Penobscot homelands in the 19th- and early 20th centuries. Penobscot people found that their ability to support themselves in their territory, in what is now known as the State of Maine, shifted throughout this period because they and successive groups of Euro-Americans relied on and used parts of the natural world in different ways, especially trees. Consequently, some groups of non-Native people were more dangerous to Penobscot prosperity than others. Colonialism did not advance in a linear or random fashion; it evolved according to how people used the landscape.Dispossession of Penobscot people waxed and waned during the 19th- and 20th centuries because settler-farmers, lumbering companies, and pulp and paper corporations exerted varying impacts on the lands and resources that were most integral to the Penobscot economy. Penobscots used most parts of the landscape, but paper birch and brown ash trees were especially important to them as the materials for making canoes and baskets, which were their main mode of transportation and one of their primary trade goods, respectively. Settler-farmers only occupied the southernmost portion of Penobscot homelands, but they targeted birch and ash trees and the habitats in which they grew. Lumbering companies harvested an unprecedented amount of pine and spruce trees, but they ignored birch and ash. Pulp and paper corporations, on the other hand, razed forests all across the region, including areas containing those valuable trees.
I also highlight the role of seasonal patterns of land and resource use in determining the course of Native dispossession. Penobscot people worked throughout the entire year, but the warmer springs and summers were their most productive seasons. Settler-farmers were constant presences in the southern forests of Penobscot homelands; lumbering companies only operated during the colder months from late fall to early spring; and pulp and paper companies were permanent fixtures across the entire region. When people use land and resources is as important as which resources they use, where they operate, and how they harvest resources.
Thus, I argue that Penobscot people found early 19th-century settler agriculture threatening, mid- and late 19th-century industrial lumbering manageable, and early 20th-century pulp and paper production devastating. Penobscot people were never able to completely halt or reverse colonialism, but they found that 19th-century, industrial modes of non-Native land and resource use left significant room for them to mitigate and influence the course of their own dispossession.
I analyze the progression of colonialism according to Native dispossession, which I track along two axes: physical and nominal. Physical dispossession occurs when non-Native actors prevent Native people from accessing or using the material resources they need to support themselves. Nominal dispossession takes place when non-Native people assert immaterial authority over Native people and polities. Essentially, I differentiate between claims to land and actual use of the land. Most scholars of Native and colonial history emphasize land claims, but I contend that how Penobscot and non-Native people used land and resources drove the ultimate course of colonialism and resistance to it in the 19th- and early 20th centuries.
Finally, this dissertation highlights the utility of centering private actors and their modes of land and resource use as a means of “stretching” narratives of colonialism and Native resistance beyond obvious manifestations of Native dispossession. Treaties between Native polities and the colonial state, the creation of colonial law, and colonial religious conversions are important aspects of the history of colonialism, but Native people often continued to lose access to land and resources after formal, state-driven events such as these. In the Maine context, the state seized Penobscot territory for the final time in 1833 through a fraudulent purchase, but industrial logging companies furthered Penobscot dispossession by harvesting trees, damming rivers, and surveilling forests across their homelands well into the 20th century. Emphasizing the natural world and private actors fosters an expansive, nuanced timeline of Native dispossession and resistance.