The Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, 1770–1840

By Shelby Johnson

In this theory-rich study, Shelby Johnson analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World, examining how their literary production informs "modes of being" that confronted violent colonial times. Johnson particularly assesses how these authors connected to places—whether real or imagined—and how those connections enabled them to make worlds in spite of the violence of slavery and settler colonialism. Johnson engages with works written in a period engulfed by the extraordinary political and social upheavals of the Age of Revolution and Indian Removal, and these texts—which include not only sermons, life writing, and periodicals but also descriptions of embodied and oral knowledge, as well as material objects—register defiance to land removal and other forms of violence.

In studying writers of color during this era, Johnson probes the histories of their lived environment and of the earth itself—its limits, its finite resources, and its metaphoric mortality—in a way that offers new insights on what it means to imagine sustainable connections to the ground on which we walk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781469677927

Shelby Johnson

Shelby Johnson is assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University.

Book preview

Cover: The Rich Earth between Us, The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, 1770–1840 by Shelby Johnson

The Rich Earth between Us

The Rich Earth between Us

The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, 1770–1840

Shelby Johnson

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

© 2024 Shelby Johnson

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Johnson, Shelby Lynn, 1988– author.

Title: The rich earth between us : the intimate grounds of race and sexuality in the Atlantic world, 1770–1840 / Shelby Johnson.

Other titles: Intimate grounds of race and sexuality in the Atlantic world, 1770–1840

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press,

[2024]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023045907 | ISBN 9781469677903 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469677910 (pbk. ; alk paper) | ISBN 9781469677927 (ebook) | ISBN 9798890887320 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Occom, Samson, 1723–1792—Criticism and interpretation. | Prince, Mary—Criticism and interpretation. | Apess, William,1798–1839—Criticism and interpretation. | Wedderburn, R. (Robert)—Criticism and interpretation. | Indian authors—United States—Political and social views. | Authors, Black—West Indies—Political and social views. | Land tenure—Atlantic Ocean Region. | Right of property—Atlantic Ocean Region. | Settler colonialism—Social aspects—Atlantic Ocean Region. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American & Black | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Sexuality (see also PSYCHOLOGY / Human Sexuality)

Classification: LCC PS153.I52 J64 2024 | DDC 810.9/896—dc23/eng/20231108

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023045907

Cover illustration: Topographic map by pixelrobot/stock.adobe.com.

This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the University of Michigan Press, and the University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/.

For my mother

Karen Johnson Bateman

And for all our shared losses in 2020

… return to me, oh Lord of then

and now, my mother’s calling,

her young voice humming my name.

—LUCILLE CLIFTON

may we be unafraid to mourn and together and hugely …

help us to see the bees yet in the lavender

the spokes of sunlight down through the oaks.

—TEDDY MACKER

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Dreaming with Samson Occom

CHAPTER TWO

Mary Prince and the Matter of Salt

CHAPTER THREE

With William Apess at Forest’s Edge

CHAPTER FOUR

Robert Wedderburn, Prophet of Unfinished Revolution

Coda

Notes

Index

List of Figures

1. Theodor de Bry, Valboa wirfft etliche Indianer / welche die schreckliche Sünd der Sodomey begangen / den Hunden für sie zuzerreissen or Balboa throws some [Indigenous people], who [were perceived to have] committed sodomy, to the dogs to be torn apart (1580) 13

2. George Cruikshank, The New Union Club (1819) 130

Acknowledgments

It does not escape me that this project on collective worldmaking only came into existence through the love extended by colleagues, friends, and family at a moment of global crisis. Much of writing for this book was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and my mother’s death in April 2020. Although her passing was ultimately not due to COVID-19, the pandemic certainly shaped my experience of grief, as quarantine prevented family gatherings over that long first year after her death. At the time of her passing, I had been working for the past year on Mohegan writer Samson Occom and proximal intimacies—desire, sensation, touch—in a precarious eighteenth-century world. I know that acute hazards exist in drawing too many parallels between Occom’s life and my own, given his experiences of communal vulnerability and racialized violence under settler colonialism. Yet in the years since my mother’s death, I have frequently returned to Occom’s wrenching testimony of his absence from his daughter Tabitha’s funeral in 1785: "Next Morning after Breakfast went on and got home about 9 found my Well three Days ago I heard a heard heavy News, my poor Tabitha is Dead & Buried, the Lord the Sovereign of the Universe Sanctify this Dispensation to me and to all my

Family—[.]"

I have often meditated on Occom’s inability to record Tabitha’s death until three days after he heard the heavy News and about the agony archived in his stutter, I heard a heard—an echo that lingers with the desperate prayer for sanctification that he cries out for but cannot finish. Occom’s words have remained with me in a time defined by delayed services and distant suffering, and I have wondered if his prayer could assemble a recuperative praxis for healing the ruptures of social isolation and communal loss occasioned by the pandemic’s longue durée, which encompasses not only the health disparities that have fallen especially hard on communities of color, but also various forms of state-sanctioned violence. Sanctified, of course, is rooted in the Latin sanctus, which means to be set apart or to be made holy, used often in the sense of to be declared separate or to be bound. Put differently, his prayer extends an urgent question: What could it look like to grieve like and with Occom and to bind ourselves in shared commitment to the work of decolonial worldmaking in the days ahead?

I am indebted to Jonathan Lamb, Mark Schoenfield, Hortense Spillers, and Scott J. Juengel at Vanderbilt University, and to Misty G. Anderson at the University of Tennessee, for encouraging the questions this book takes up. I am especially grateful to Scott and Misty for their continuing friendship and mentorship over the years. Early archival work for this project was supported by a Drake Research Fellowship (2015) and a College of Arts and Sciences Summer Research Award (2016) through Vanderbilt University. I also appreciate the assistance extended by the English Department and the College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University, including the Scholarly and Creative Achievement Fellowship (2019–20), which enabled me to make progress on this book during a difficult year. Eric Berlatsky, Wendy Hinshaw, Regis Fox, Stacey Balkan, Stacy Lettman, Tim Miller, Oliver Buckton, Papatya Bucak, Sika Dagbovie-Mullins, Ash Kini, Tony Stagliano, Andy Furman, Carla Thomas, Ian MacDonald, and Kate Pollack—and while they were at FAU, Adam Bradford, Devin Garofalo, José de la Garza Valenzuela, and R. J. Boutelle—were all generous colleagues, many of whom supported me in ways that I can never repay. I am so grateful for Becka McKay and Clarissa Chenovick, in particular, whose friendship and kindness made all the difference. In addition, I cannot express the fullness of my appreciation to my colleagues at Oklahoma State University, including Jeff Menne, An Cheng, Lisa Hollenbach, Lindsey Wilhelm, Steph Link, Kate Hallemeier, Tim Murphey, Sarah Beth Childers, and Elizabeth Grubgeld, whose hospitality and welcome have sustained me as I have brought this project to completion. My deepest thanks especially to Bill Decker, Alyssa Hunziker, Rafael Hernandez, Cailey Hall, and Chelsea Silva for their friendship during my first year in Oklahoma. I am grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences at Oklahoma State, which provided financial support in preparing the manuscript. And I am indebted to the University of North Carolina Press for supporting this project, especially to Lucas Church, Thomas Bedenbaugh, and Valerie Burton for their attention to the manuscript. I also appreciate David Robertson’s assistance with the index.

My scholarship has been fortified by so many dear friends and colleagues. I am grateful for Ana Schwartz, Jessica Taylor, Abby L. Goode, Evelyn Soto, and Blevin Shelnutt for reading portions of this work—their comments enriched my life in unnumerable ways. I thank Ana especially for her unfailing encouragement when I could not find the words during a long year of grief. I deeply appreciate Kerry Sinanan, Mariam Wassif, Ereck Jarvis, Megan Peiser, and Sam Plasencia for modeling their commitments to decolonial praxes in the Woman of Colour and Antiracist Pedagogy working group and for thoughtfully engaging with my scholarship—their insights resonate throughout this book. Hannah Manshel, Ben Bascom, Cass Turner, Kate Ozment, Joe Albernaz, and Carrie Shanafelt were also generous readers of parts of this book and incalculably shaped its arc. Conversations with Kimberly Takahata on Samson Occom, Kristina Huang on Mary Prince and Robert Wedderburn, Rebecca Anne Barr on decolonial intimacies, and M. A. Miller on queer ecologies have abundantly influenced my thinking in this work. Caroline Wigginton gave much appreciated guidance on preparing the book proposal and finding a press, and Greta LaFleur and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon offered incisive comments on this project at a vital moment in its development and revision—I cannot thank them enough for their time, labor, and collegiality. Katy Chiles, Emily C. Friedman, Gena Zuroski, Kelly Wisecup, and Ramesh Mallipeddi have been kind friends and mentors over the years. I have been sustained by the boundless support and encouragement Jeremy Chow, Don Rodrigues, and Kirsten Mendoza have shown me—I would not be where I am without their friendship. And finally, my deepest gratitude to my family, especially my sister and brother-in-law, Katie and David Eldridge, and my partner, Sari Carter, for the gift of their abiding love.

The Rich Earth between Us

Introduction

The earth was given to the children of men, making no difference for colour or character, just or unjust; and … any person calling a piece of land his own private property, was a criminal; and though they may sell it, or will it to their children, it is only transferring of that which was first obtained by force or fraud.

—ROBERT WEDDERBURN

It is very clear, that God … has given the earth to the children of men, given it to mankind in common. But this being supposed, it seems to some a very great difficulty how any one should ever come to have a property in any thing.

—JOHN LOCKE

In The Axe Laid to the Root, or A Fatal Blow to Oppressors, Being an Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica (1817), Robert Wedderburn turns to Psalm 115:16 as an origin story for a global commons: The earth was given to the children of men, making no difference for colour or character, just or unjust.¹ To some extent, his assertion that property is the outcome of force or fraud echoes prominent European philosophers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Second Discourse on Inequality (1755): You are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.² Yet Wedderburn goes much further than Rousseau: he argues that slavery and land enclosure are not separate historical processes but constitutive forms of racial violence.³ His citation of Psalm 115:16 authorizes a wide-ranging critique of the very foundations of early modern political discourse, an undertaking that becomes clear when read alongside John Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government (1689) similarly invokes an earth given to the children of men, but to a radically different purpose: a gifted earth is a problem, for it is a very great difficulty how any one should come to make property from what is offered freely.⁴ Locke, of course, famously solves the great difficulty by portioning the globe through the accumulation of property: he who inherits the earth becomes he who owns it through the improving labor of his hands. Locke’s work builds on and extends an entire grammar of civil personhood, endowed with a capacity to amass property and enact contracts.⁵ Early modern political theories of propertied individualism index not only global economic systems but also intimate structures of desire—what is yearned for, overt and implicit, when property accumulation is the aim.

Indeed, Black activists like Wedderburn show that practices of racialized extraction organize individual property accumulation and global imperialism: [The earth] cannot be justly the private property of individuals, because it was never manufactured by man; therefore, whoever first sold it, sold that which was not his own, and of course there cannot be a title deed produced consistent with natural and universal justice.⁸ Wedderburn’s critique pointedly targets Lockean theories of property, but his insight also challenges canonical texts like Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795), which speculates on what is necessary to sustain international peace—and thus extends a view of the earth at odds with the Black radical tradition: Since the earth is a globe, they cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerate one another’s company. And no one originally has any greater right than anyone else to occupy any particular portion of the earth.⁹ Although Kant here seems to recognize a greater right to shared possession of the earth, perpetual peace can emerge only once global populations adhere to a universal, common law.¹⁰ For Wedderburn, however, to assent to this common law leaves no paper trail consistent with natural and universal justice.¹¹ In this way, his redefining of significant conceptual terms—commons, property, universal law, justice—synthesizes what was for many European philosophers an inherent tension in fictions of a gifted earth: that possibilities for political plurality can coexist with global commoning—that international law need not reflect hegemonic European norms.

In The Rich Earth Between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, I argue that early Black and Indigenous writers like Samson Occom (Mohegan Nation), Mary Prince, William Apess (Mashantucket Pequot Nation), and Robert Wedderburn draw from diasporic visions of a gifted earth to challenge forms of propertied individualism governing social life, and, through a defiant witness to enslavement and enclosure, they open new avenues of lived experience for inhabiting the earth, then and now. Broadly, their rehearsals of a gifted earth dissent from the material and imagined configurations of what Cedric Robinson names racial capitalism.⁶ For Robinson, while acts of enslavement and enclosure might seem like dramatic breaks with medieval feudal and early modern mercantilist systems, global markets evolved from and were dependent on longstanding racial hierarchies governing African and Indigenous lives, both physically and psychically. And while European and American theorists developed frameworks to challenge proletarian precarity and industrial waste, within diasporic worlds, a separate mode of critique took root: the Black radical tradition.⁷

Guided by Wedderburn, I turn to Black and Indigenous writers as figures who are centrally concerned with colonial expansion and enslavement as systemic expressions of planetary enclosure—and who responded by consistently calling for all things common, as Wedderburn puts it.¹² Literary scholars and historians have turned to the early modern period as an era animated by conflicts over the commons, where, as Allan Greer argues, colonial governments negotiated a range of legal codes, political institutions, inhabited rituals, and knowledge systems as historically situated social practices of land occupation and resource use—processes he names property-formation.¹³ Drawing from theoretical insights on commons in early American studies, as well as contemporary theories of commoning, I explore how Black and Native writers negotiated property-formation as merely the most visible manifestation of diffuse structures of power reorganizing space and time itself.¹⁴ They reveal how property-formation seeped into everyday life in less explicit ways, shaping and reshaping an array of embodied and intimate relations. In what follows in this introduction, I stage a series of encounters with Occom, Prince, Apess, and Wedderburn to consider the affordances of seeing, if only fleetingly, the shape of their desires for knowing, being, and belonging to the earth. In this way, I hope to show that their gestures to commons do more than extend frameworks for land use and resource accumulation but (re)assemble worlds. While I cannot always make claims about the substance of these desires, which is beyond my purview as a settler scholar, this book marshals methodologies for reading early Indigenous and Black writings for and with their vibrant worldmaking practices.

Small Plots

In different ways, Black and Indigenous writers responded to emergent property-formation by enacting what I am calling small plots, or decolonial performances of worlding improvised in everyday intimacies and knowledge systems. For this, I draw from Sylvia Wynter’s argument that the novel and the plantation developed as constitutive worldmaking structures within colonial regimes, against which diasporic communities cultivated fugitive lifeways on the plantation’s margins—in marronage and provision grounds, in secretive histories and spiritualities.¹⁵ Wynter presses on plot’s polyphonic meanings, as both a narrative form and a piece of earth, to show how the colonized world was (and is) known, disciplined, and governed. Still, plot in this book never quite materializes into anything as discretely recognizable as the novel or the plantation. Instead, each chapter explores orientations to intensely local spatial terrains and fields of sensation: Occom with Mohegan coastal life and Montaukett herbal practices, Prince with Caribbean salt industries and diasporic stories of salt, Apess with Haudenosaunee and Pequot woodland relations, and Wedderburn with material and imagined improvisations of Black commons among Jamaican Maroons and after the Haitian Revolution. To untangle their plots from encounters with colonial power, as far as I can, I turn to seemingly incidental moments or brief texts to consider how they extend fugitive patterns of knowledge production and social reproduction. In this way, my use of world builds on what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls worldly sovereignty, or a way of recovering persisting and repressed forms and formations of being in the world, shaped by and through intimate knowledge of the world and its secrets, of its multiple natural, spiritual, political, and cosmological taxonomies preserved and transmitted over generations.¹⁶ Because these early worldmaking formations would have been largely opaque within colonial records and institutions implicated in erasing Black and Indigenous knowledges, theirs are ways of life archived in hidden sensations and concealed desires—in small plots.

Even so, I acknowledge that a small plot like the earth was given to the children of men may not initially appear radical. Sarah Jane Cervenak reminds us that the givenness of the earth may not be easily extricated from the conceptions of propertied personhood that underscored Enlightenment philosophies of liberal humanism as exemplified in Locke.¹⁷ Indeed, Locke’s fiction of beginnings—of a given and then owned earth—marshalled a critical grammar used to justify Indigenous dispossession, Black slavery, and industrialized agriculture on a massive scale, illustrated in his own involvement in writing the Carolina Constitution and the document’s justification of slavery.¹⁸ Near the close of The History of Mary Prince (1831), Prince illuminates the ongoing relevance to this violent logic of gifted earth and life when she urges that enslaved people be given free, and slavery done up forevermore.¹⁹ If we recall the intensely mediated nature of her narrative, where English antislavery activists transcribed her testimony, we might wonder how Prince would have enunciated a radically different freedom dream under less constrained conditions.²⁰ Perhaps she approaches something like this critique much earlier in The History when she describes the power which the white people’s law had given … over me as the scene of subjection she inhabits on Barbados.²¹ The circumstances of her restricted voice show that in the historical arena of an early nineteenth-century Atlantic world, freedom itself is transformed into a gift owned and bestowed only in proximity to settler expansion, a coordination of whiteness and property that theorists of the law, such as Cheryl Harris, Colin Dayan, Joanne Barker (Lenape Nation), and Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Dandrubin Goenpul of the Quandamooka Nation) have argued defines modern organizations of personhood, citizenship, and ownership.²² Is it possible, then, to read in Wedderburn’s announcement of a global commons something like what Cervenak calls a "Black life

[that]

moves as if flesh and earth were neither givable nor ownable"?²³ Can we, in other words, recover ways that Prince and Wedderburn may have re-signified this script of given origins to conceive of ungiven life and earth?

To consider these questions, I engage with Occom’s early letters from the 1760s to Apess’s essays and sermons from the 1830s, an archive assembled within an era engulfed by the extraordinary political upheavals of the age of revolutions and Indigenous removals. This archive includes not only life writing, religious texts, and periodicals but also descriptions of embodied and oral knowledge, as well as cultural artforms and inscribed objects. Occom’s life, for instance, was shaped by the danger the American Revolution posed to Indigenous communities.²⁴ Military incursion and wartime losses framed his painful decision to leave the Mohegan Nation in Connecticut and relocate to Brothertown, New York, in 1783—a choice staked on the possibility of communal survival elsewhere. Yet sometime after he moved, Occom sent a small carved box to his sister, Lucy Occom Tantaquidgeon, who remained at Mohegan. Metaphorically and materially, the box carries the anguished weight of impossible choices—to stay or to go—that conditioned eighteenth-century Algonquian exigence. Painted with traditional Path of the Sun and Trail of Life designs, the box is also a reminder that the Mohegan who chose to leave were bound in kinship to those who remained in Connecticut. In similar ways, Apess draws on Pequot and Haudenosaunee histories to connect with an Indigenous diaspora in an era when displacement accelerated after the War of 1812 and the Indian Removal Act (1830). Likewise, Prince and Wedderburn’s testimonies to enslavement radiate with fugitive practices of survival, as Wedderburn turns to the Haitian Revolution and Prince to Black women’s counter-economies to envision radical possibilities for a shared earth out of unimaginably brutal local circumstances, whose violences Wedderburn argues will require a universal revolution to fully redress.²⁵

While the historical frame of The Rich Earth Between Us, 1750–1840, is often bifurcated between the disciplinary emphases of early American studies and eighteenth-century British literature, timely interventions in oceanic and hemispheric methodologies have connected and crossed these fields’ geographical borders to explore the production of a global modernity shaped by colonial trade, capitalist accumulation, and imperial expansion.²⁶ Indeed, British and American imperial policies increasingly pursued continent-spanning acts of Indigenous displacement and Black captivity to construct large plantation empires, exploiting enslaved labor to produce the consumable goods—coffee, sugar, tea—energizing Western appetites.²⁷ These plantation projects, including the corrosive salt industries where Prince labored for a decade, ruthlessly reformatted bodies and ecologies within global economies that continue to contour the geologic epoch we now inhabit. Recent critical interventions by Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw Nation), Jace Weaver (Cherokee Nation), and Robbie Richardson (Mi’gmaw and Pabineau First Nation) have shown that the discursive and political exercises of transatlantic empires were premised on the conscripted crossings and exploitations of Black and Indigenous peoples. In addition, scholars working at the intersection of Black and Indigenous studies, such as Tiffany Lethabo King, Sharon Holland, Tiya Miles, and Kathryn Walkiewicz (Cherokee Nation), have explored counter-conceptions of nationality, citizenship, and kinship elaborated in the work of writers of color as Western ideologies of race subtended a new global order.²⁸ Broadly, these critics demonstrate that settler colonial discourses imposed racial designations on people of African and Indigenous descent, eliding their own affiliations with home, territory, community, and family as part of the emerging exigencies of capital extraction.²⁹ Building on these scholarly pathways, The Rich Earth Between Us deploys plot’s multiple meanings—a narrative script, a piece of earth, a fugitive conspiracy—to show how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers of color responded to revolutionary events and removal crossings by reimagining ways of inhabiting their bodies and communities.

As an emergence narrative, the earth was given to the children of men illustrates only one way writers like Occom, Prince, Apess, and Wedderburn reconfigured local knowledges to defy imperial property-formations and their shared origins with modes of racial capitalism (extractive enclosure, plantation enslavement) advancing throughout the Atlantic world. Although the earth was given to the children of men marks one speculative pathway for tracing worldmaking practices, the citation also interweaves with other expressions of worldly defiance against colonialism, including hemispheric revolts against enslavement, routines of fugitivity and marronage, and Indigenous revitalization movements to restore traditions of care for their homelands.³⁰ Throughout this book, attending to small plots thus allows me to assemble a methodology that turns to other scales of critical investigation—quotidian, local, contingent—and to make visible, so far as is possible, the survivals and revivals of Black and Indigenous worlds. Collectively, then, the worldmaking scripts improvised by Occom, Prince, Apess, and Wedderburn unsettle colonial formations of history by enacting arrangements of sovereignty as large as revolution or as small as a carved box.

Plural Worlds

Throughout, I am invested not only in fictions of what happened to common worlds—or how colonial writers explained the division of the earth into countries and empires, peoples and plots—but also in Black and Indigenous worldmaking alternatives. This commitment arises from a belief that anticolonial archives marshal different organizations of political and material life, of human and nonhuman relation.³¹ For this, I draw from scholarship engaged in what some have called an ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities, whose major critical strands are challenging philosophical traditions that constructed sharp hierarchies between life and nonlife, subject and object, body and mind, nature and humanity.³² Yet this body of scholarship seldom extends to the colonial period: while critics in eighteenth-century and early American studies have generatively engaged with ontology through thing theory and animal studies, Black and Indigenous worlds rarely appear in these critical conversations, with analysis instead addressing their strategic adaptations to settler languages and adjustments to property.³³ At the same time, it is clear that settler ontologies were predicated on racialized teleologies—that Indigenous nations were destined to vanish and people of African descent were inherently enslaveable—which marked their land and labor as things whose productive and reproductive potential could be exploited.³⁴ We know, too, that colonists not only sought to occupy non-European territories and impose a new global order of racialized subjectivity, but they also sought to obliterate Black and Indigenous cosmogonies, or stories of communal origin that enunciate different ways of being in relation with and knowing the world, with John Law calling these settler projects of erasure the imposition of a one-world world.³⁵ When Spanish conquistadors destroyed Mayan libraries, for instance, the Popol Vuh, a K’iche’ emergence cycle, became one of the only codices to survive in an alphabetic translation of its hieroglyphic script.³⁶ With this history in view, engaging with the ontological turn may help us chart a colonial onto-epistemic regime that has granted itself the right to assimilate all other worlds and, by presenting itself as exclusive, cancels possibilities for what lies beyond its limits, as Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena argue, circumstances that Occom, Prince, Wedderburn, and Apess all testify to.³⁷

But from another perspective, I may not be engaged in the ontological turn at all. Zoe Todd (Métis) reminds us that what we consider ontology is nearly always an enunciation of colonial modernity.³⁸ Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh urge that we must delink from the traps of Western epistemic ontology to open up to epistemic pluriversality—a task that has become more urgent in an era when neoliberal economic policies and anthropogenic climate change are increasingly placing the possibility of plural worlds or a world at all at risk.³⁹ Because of this, scholars engaged in what we might rename the pluriversal turn, especially in Black and Indigenous studies, principally take up contemporary literature and activism rather than earlier archives. The Rich Earth Between Us engages with this aporia by surveying how late capitalist distributions of exhaustion and ruin are rooted in early modern shifts in property-formations and ecological extraction, which Cass Turner argues rendered the globe an ontologically flat domain of commerce, in which persons, places, and things were equally available for disposal.⁴⁰

These insights shape my effort to pursue two somewhat counterintuitive aims in this project: to trace how Black and Indigenous cosmogonies are rendered opacities in colonial archives and to improvise methods for recovering