Introduction: Race, Ethnicity, and the Environment

Abstract:The Oak Openings documents, reproduces, and enforces a textual racial formation that strives to reconstruct and reshape a Native sovereign space of Anishinaabewaki into West Michigan. For Cooper, the transformation of the land, from “empty” to productive, anticipated a necessary conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity and assimilation of white civilization that forms the plot trajectory of his novel. Despite drawing on a discourse of an empty wilderness and providentially- and racially-ordained expansion, The Oak Openings, like many of Cooper’s so-called Indian novels, is compelled to address ongoing Native presence and the Anishinaabeg’s determined struggle for sovereignty. For Cooper, a bee discourse proved an effective fictional device to operationalizes whites’ imagined superiority as an ethical justification for settler-colonial process of land expropriation, mass killings, removal, and subjugation. Native history and culture prove unfriendly to the seeming inevitability of this settler colonial logic. Anishinaabe societies preferred alliances through mutually beneficial relations over violent confrontations. What has been read by scholars as subjugation through the supplanting of traditional Indian cultural values, in the context of Anishinaabewaki, should be regarded as the long-held cultural practice of resilience and resistance to subjugation.