Before American History juxtaposes Mexico City's famous carved Sun Stone with the mounded earthworks found throughout the Midwestern states of the U.S. to examine the project of settler nationalism from the 1780s to the 1840s in two North American republics usually studied separately. As the U.S. and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent nations-and before war scarred them both-antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America's Indigenous pasts. These settler-colonial understandings of North America's past deliberately misappropriated Indigenous histories and repurposed them and their material objects as "American antiquities," thereby writing Indigenous pasts out of U.S. and Mexican national histories and national lands and erasing and denigrating Native peoples living in both nascent republics.Christen Mucher creatively recovers the Sun Stone and mounded earthworks as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, produced by Indigenous people but settler controlled and settler interpreted. Her approach renders visible the foundational methodologies, materials, and mythologies that created an American history out of and on top of Indigenous worlds and facilitated Native dispossession continent-wide. By writing Indigenous actors out of national histories, Mexican and U.S. elites also wrote them out of their lands, a legacy of erasure and removal that continues when we repeat these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century settler narratives and that reverberates in discussions of immigration, migration, and Nativism today.
Christen Mucher is Associate Professor of American Studies at Smith College and coeditor of Decolonizing "Prehistory" Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America.
Christen Mucher excavates the foundations of American history, illuminating both structures and fissures. Before American History is deeply researched and intricately constructed, showing how colonial theories about Indigenous people and origins in Mexico and the United States were interrelated and co-constituted within a transamerican network. Before American History illuminates the relationship between colonial nation-building and antiquarian research, revealing the ways in which preservation, removal and replacement are intertwined. Even as Mucher "unsettles" the ideologies and motivations behind the American quest for Indigenous origins - such as the Bering Strait theory and the Moundbuilder Myth - she meticulously constructs a transhemispheric origin story for American history. --Lisa Brooks, Amherst College, author of Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War Original, compelling, and deeply researched, Before American History documents the ideological assembly and historical use of Indigenous cultural archives in the service of North American settler nationalism. Part intellectual history, part deep-dive historiography, part comparative literary and material study, ?Christen Mucher's interdisciplinary approach offers a powerful new lens to understand the historical basis, present urgency, and future implications of demands for recognition of Native American cultural sovereignty. An outstanding contribution to the recent hemispheric and temporal turns in American studies and Americanist literary studies, to North American history, Native American and Indigenous studies, the history of ideas, and museum studies. --Robert Lawrence Gunn, University of Texas at El Paso, author of Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands Succeeds in its efforts to understand the politics of the past as they relate to settler colonialism across borders by consistently situating this "epistemology in the making"--and the resulting scholarship--in the context of the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands and histories, past and present.... Characterized by a depth of insight and lucidity of exposition, Before American History will be of interest especially to readers in Native American and Indigenous studies, settler-colonial studies, archaeology, anthropology, history of science, American studies, and Mexican history. -- "H-Early-America"
