Introduction

Exhibition Framework

Situating the history of Letitia Carson as the central nexus of this investigation, AFRO-INDIGENOUS RECONSTRUCTIONS uses the phenomena of the Oregon Trail, as an organizing pathology of the motivations, opportunities, conflicts, and subversions carried out by Black and Indigenous subjects through the duration of Westward Expansion. Identifying the mediums and criteria of investigation, RECONSTRUCTIONS references the journeys of Black settlers along the Trail and intersects their interactions with Indigenous nations to understand the range of dynamics, and trajectories that occurred through these initial interactions. Building out these personal journeys and initial interactions, RECONSTRUCTIONS posits a new addition to the political moment of Reconstruction to assert: a new time frame, an indigenous critique of its settler colonial imaginary, and to formulate through historical anecdotes, a historic afro-indigenous notion of placemaking made material through the initial interactions of Black settlers and Indigenous nations.

The exhibition takes reference to Letitia Carson's life to understand how her unique record in the archive of American History, as the first Black person to receive a homestead land patent, is apart of a series of other critical life stories that illustrate the nuances and tensions of making Black life post-emancipation. As the land that Letitia inherited is that of the ancestral and contemporary Kalapuya people, it is critical to understand her record in the archive as the outfall of settler colonialism. The promise of the Homestead Act of 1862 inculcated soon to be free Black communities into the settler colonial project of settling the American West, transforming the once self ontology as property to the opportunity of self-desired wage labor, and the original position of Black spatial design “tabula rasa.” The reality of the transformation of racial capital from slavery to free wage labor extended nationalism as a call to all, while maintaining the precedent order of anti-black social exclusion, and indigenous genocide mediated through the production of new spaces that proved the incompatibility of a multiracial citizenship on “new land” when still dependent on normative  infrastructural processes, and the banality of individual violences. 

As a method of understanding history today, I have organized these rewritings, speculations, and visibilities into three categories of case studies: 

  • DESIGN IN [subjected to]; 

    to describe those interactions that Black and indigenous bodies were subjected to by some larger structural force; while still finding situations, and dynamics of subversion to afford themselves a freedom not present in their prior material lives. 

    FABLE 1: COCKSTOCK AFFAIR  

    • TEMPORAL: OREGON TRAIL END; beginning with the ‘end’ of the historical period 
    • ARGUMENTATION:  Early Anglo-American settlers of the Oregon Territory were concerned with the potential of competition for land and resources with present Native tribes, and newly freed Blacks. As these Anglo-Americans were from largely lower, non-land owning classes, the idea of the frontier meant the fulfilled entitlements of white occupation of land and all the means of producing space. Yet, the presence of white settlers of French heritage, already in the Oregon Territory, reflected an extension of rights to self-governance to all peoples who produced for themselves. Through the construction of a fictitious account of the threat of a Black and Indigenous uprising against white settlers in the Territory, Anglo-Americans successfully rallied the United States to construct a police force in the state and to ratify the amendment of the Territory as a state to the Union.

    FABLE 2: NW ORDINANCES AND RACIAL EXCLUSIONS 

    • TEMPORAL: PRE-OREGON TRAIL; progressing to the ‘beginning’ of the historical period 
    • ARGUMENTATION: The post-American Revolution reordering of the colonies into the United States already marked the consolidation of private property ownership to a selective class. This consolidation laid the foundation for generating ideas of place and the entitlements of white identity to complete dominion over land. The Northwest Ordinance laid the foundation for what kinds of Americans were entitled to citizenship and the means of social mobility, excluding Black individuals and continuing the erasure of indigenous communities. The settlement of the Northwest Territories (the modern-day Midwest) were built on a spatial logic of a participatory, white-agraian democracy that promised land, and the capacity to labor the stolen land into capital that would be accumulated. This settlement of the Northwest was dependent upon the exclusion of all non-white people to protect the white lower class labor from the threat of the full enslavement of Black labor. 

    FABLE 3: ROSE JACKSON, DEMONIC GROUNDS 

    • TEMPORAL: BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER THE OREGON TRAIL
    • ARGUMENTATION: In a promise of freedom at the end of the Oregon Trail, Rose Jackson reincarcerated herself to the confines of a wooden box, concealing her racial identity as she moved West in search of the potential of land and a new life. While transported by her former enslavers, Jackson made her journey successfully hidden in her former enslaver's possessions. The strong appeal of a life displaced from the plantation, and the exploitation of urban factories led to spectacular negotiations amongst previously enslaved Blacks to make it successfully to the "open" land and "opportunity" of the West.

  • DESIGN THROUGH [co-created]; 

    to describe those solidarities formed across racial distinctions, in which Black and indigenous subjects laid claim to their rightful participation in the larger spatial governing structure to afford new rights and legal protections they had been denied. 

    FABLE 4: RACHEL v. WALKER, BLACK FREEDOM and CITIZEN PROLOGUE

    • TEMPORAL:  DURING THE OREGON TRAIL
    • ARGUMENTATION: Despite the abolition of slavery in the Northwest Territories, many Black individuals were smuggled to these newly settling areas to continue their role of abject exploitation. One of these individuals, Rachel was supported by Michigan Territory settlers to utilize a newly enacted Missouri law that allowed poor people to file suit against any entity illegally misusing their labor. Rachel utilized this law to sue for her and her son's right to freedom. Similarly, to Letitia, we see the potential of the legal appartus to evolve in part to allow the interpretative capacity of Black racial subjects to rights as citizens. 

    FABLE 5: TREATY AT POINT ELLIOTT

    • TEMPORAL: BEFORE THE OREGON TRAIL 

    • ARGUMENTATION: Treaties are legally binding, Congressional voted agreements between sovereign states. As the United States government began its legal codification of indigenous genocide and dispossession, there were many epistemic manipulations used by settlers to misrepresent and intentionally manipulate legal documentation to reflect their own land survey as the extents of the agreed upon cessation of land. The Treaty at Point Elliott illustrates both a language and conceptual manipulation that led to the foundational dispossession of Coastal Salish peoples from their lands, and the creation of a reservation system that set the groundwork for passing a law similar to the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act offering acre entitlements to white men and families. 

  • DESIGN AS [sovereign]; 

    to account for the diverse, and complicated methods of seeking, maintaining, and being free taken up by Black and indigenous persons that ultimately produced an entirely new relationship of themselves to space and time; particularly through the complexity of identity and expected political disposition that gave greater individual sovereignty.. 

    FABLE 6: T.H. JEFFERSON, RACIAL AMBIGUITY AND ITERATIVE FREEDOMS WESTWARD 

    • TEMPORAL:  DURING THE OREGON TRAIL
    • ARGUMENTATION: Access to manipulation to receive what one desired was not only beholden to white settlers. The notion of "passing" is critical to any historical understanding of how individual's used white privilege to assert their personal access to benefitting from a racial hierarchy. Yet, the American West as a spatial idea and place for self-claim of identity towards social benefits is unique in that history of racial exclusion over the territory and the lack of established governance meant that many non-white individuals were able to claim whiteness to grant themselves access where they could not in the existing country. 

    FABLE 7: JOHN TAYLOR + KITTY CLOUD

    • TEMPORAL: BEFORE THE OREGON TRAIL 

    • ARGUMENTATION: The earliest introduction of formerly enslaved individuals to the American West was facilitated in part by Buffalo soldiers, who were used by the American government to surveil and enforce anti-indigenous governance of space. Yet, this was also the potential of the encounter and shared solidarity of Black individuals with indigenous peoples who could resonate with the intensity of white supremacist violence. John Taylor, a former Buffalo soldier, was well-received, integrated, and a leader of resistance to settler encroachment on Ute land in Colorado. The afterlives of his marriage to Kitty Cloud represents the potential of new identities and new solidarities among Black and Indigenous communities.