Le groupe de recherche A19 (VALE, Sorbonne Université, et ECHELLES, Université Paris Cité) a le grand plaisir de vous annoncer la tenue d’un séminaire dédié à l’historien, artiste, et écrivain amérindien David Cusick (1780-1840).
Le séminaire aura lieu le 20 février de 14 à 16 heures à la Bibliothèque de l’UFR d’études anglophones de Sorbonne Université et en ligne (le lien Zoom est disponible ici).
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Sheila Byers (Oxford University), “Becoming Many Small Mosquitoes: Temporal Ecology in David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations”
In his 1828 Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, the Tuscarora writer, historian, and artist David Cusick relates an incident in which a giant mosquito invades a Haudenosaunee community living near the shores of Lake Onondaga. After days of biting and torturing the community, the mosquito is defeated and its blood transforms into a swarm of small mosquitoes. This transformation means that the mosquito, perhaps paradoxically in a story of defeat, remains in the region near lake, and its blood, which was originally the blood of the people it bit, continues to circulate within the community and the natural environment in which they live. In this talk, I argue that Cusick’s mosquito swarm illustrates a specific version of ecology, one that incorporates Haudenosaunee philosophies of place-thought and a theory of time that, while it can be structured linearly, allows for the presence of multiple, individually-focused chronologies made concurrent by their intersections in space. I explore how this temporal ecology makes a persuasive case for Indigenous claims to North American land and how it participates in a larger early American milieu of ecological thinking.
Sheila Byers is the Drue Heinz Postdoctoral Fellow in American Literature at Oxford University. She works on the colonial period through the nineteenth century from a perspective that integrates the environmental humanities and the histories of science and philosophy. Her current book project, Swarms: Ecological Thought in the Early American Environment, focuses on settler colonial and Indigenous depictions of swarming insects to trace the impact of the ecological in environmental theories and philosophies of the long eighteenth century. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including ELH, The James Fenimore Cooper Society Journal, and Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal.
Christen Mucher (Smith College), “LandBack and Literary History: David Cusick’s Deep Time Stories”
The LandBack movement that has been gaining momentum in the 21st century has roots as deep as colonialism. This talk discusses how the early nineteenth-century Tuscarora historian David Cusick gives us a sense of land and LandBack as an important analytic for reading early as well as current-day Native writers.
Christen Mucher is an associate professor of American Studies at Smith College. Her first monograph, Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession (University of Virginia Press, 2022), addresses archaeology, historiography, archives, and settler nationalism in Mexico and the United States during the late colonial and early national periods. In addition to her co-translation of Stella: a Novel of the Haitian Revolution (New York University Press, 2015), she co-edited the volume Decolonizing ‘Prehistory’: Indigenous Knowledges and Deep Time in North America (University of Arizona Press, 2021). Mucher’s new project focuses on land, earth science, and Anishinaabe- and French-language documentation of the “ancient” history of North America. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, and the American Antiquarian Society. Mucher is currently the reviews editor at Early American Literature. In 2025-26, she is academic director of Smith College’s study abroad program in Paris.