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ABSTRACT
Morgan’s The American Beaver and His Works (1868) argued for animals to be understood as living thinking communicating beings. Working in northern Michigan with Ojibwe (Anishinaabeg), Morgan documented beavers’ lives in the region Ojibwe called Ish-ko-nau'-ba – ‘Many Remnants of Water’. Following their insights, Morgan argued that the ‘persevering labors of the beaver’ were communicative acts of sentient creatures, expressed in familial works transmitted generationally over centuries, claims that ecologists have since embraced. Surprisingly, The American Beaver, a classic among biologists, is little known among anthropologists. Set among mining settlements where Morgan also worked, and spanning the Civil War (1861–1865), The American Beaver exposes the deadly social-environmental consequences of settler colonialism in the U.S. to which he contributed. Yet Morgan’s focus on kinship, communication, and housing among humans and beavers alike also provides a means of examining biosocial processes of kinship and discrimination in multispecies speech communities past and present.
Acknowlegements
This essay is based on archival research in the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, University of Rochester River Campus Libraries, and the American Philosophical Society. Heartfelt thanks to the staffs of these collections for their ongoing help. I am grateful to my colleagues in Anthropology and Biology for responding so thoughtfully to my out-of-the-blue questions about how they got to know Morgan’s American Beaver: Robert Brightman, Jennifer S. H. Brown, Robert Naiman, John Poggi Jr., Marshall Sahlins, and Benson Saler. Dr. Tyler Tichelaar kindly pointed me to S.P. Ely’s entry in Beard’s Directory (1873) and Dr. Jim O’Brien to depths of US history in the mid-twentieth century. Thanks to Marianne Lien and Gísli Pálsson for inviting me into this project, for their insightful and inspiring questions and comments, and their close editorial attention, and to Judith T. Irvine and Andrew Shryock for their help with particular questions. Heartfelt thanks always to Alan Harnik for reading countless drafts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 P. 102, and Journal 6:11:265–269; see below, (nos. 28–31). Morgan’s journals and other papers bequeathed to the University of Rochester, are archived in the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, University of Rochester River Campus Libraries.
2 For the unpublished essays, see Morgan Papers, Box 22:41 [1857] and Box 11:5 [1860, partial draft].
3 Morgan’s first visit to northern Michigan in July-August 1855 was followed by a second in 1858, and six more in 1860–1866, interspersed with four trips further west in 1859–1862 (see Feeley-Harnik Citation1999: 236–242).
4 Systems was ‘accepted for publication, January, 1868’ (1871: title page); The American Beaver, completed around the same time, was published in December 1868.
5 See Morgan’s ‘Agassiz: Theory of the Diverse Origin of the Human Race. 1859’ (Morgan Papers, Box 22:44).
6 Political linguistic ideologies of unilingualism imposed upon the ‘complex, plurilingual speech communities in which people actually live’ have been common to European settler states since the Enlightenment (Silverstein Citation2010: 339). Morgan’s claim in The American Beaver (Citation1868: 281), that ‘Language has been the great instrument of [human] progress, the power of which was increased many fold when it clothed itself in written characters’, summarises the ideological definition of language in which he was educated.
7 For engravings from the 1700s, see the Archive of Early American Images, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University: https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/view/search?search=SUBMIT&q=beavers&dateRangeStart=&dateRangeEnd=&sort=image_date%2Csubject_groups&QuickSearchA=QuickSearchA.
8 The ‘most experienced field observer’ cannot sex beavers without examining internal parts (Müller-Schwarze Citation2011: 35).
9 The trap was the work of the Oneida Perfectionists in central New York State, one of the utopian and socialist communities in the US in the 1800s experimenting with biosociality in humans and animals, distinguished in part by their practice of ‘perfect marriage’ uniting all women with all men and their children in common, abolishing divisive ‘families’.
10 By 1864 Morgan had begun to learn the sounds of tail slaps, which, with scents and vocalizations, are among how beavers intercommunicate as individuals (Müller-Schwarze Citation2011: 50–51). Morgan’s ongoing efforts to learn the sounds and rhythms of Native American languages are evident in his changing spellings and diacritics (eg., Journal 2:10:309–310).
11 Debates about the status of such corporate persons as natural or artificial, and thus their civil rights as persons according to the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868), continue to the present.
12 See LaFayette (Citation1977: map (55–56), 107) for the locations of the four furnaces; a total of thirteen furnaces and four forges were built in the region between 1848 and 1868; sixteen more were added in 1870–1896.
13 Ives (Citation1942) coined the phrase, arguing that beavers are not miners hollowing out the earth, but farmers cultivating the land in which they and many other organisms can thrive. See Feeley-Harnik (Citation2014: 281–286) for details on ecologists’ research, in which Naiman’s (Citation1986) reading of Morgan (Citation1868) was critical, and Nadasdy Citation2011 on agrarian metaphors of human-animal relations.
14 Morgan (Citation1868: 30, 83, 84, 132, 134, 136, 137, 172, 226, 272) used pair for beavers’ lifelong unions, never monogamy so central to his work on human kinship.
15 In a rare exception, he wrote in August 1862 that William Cameron had just enlisted in the Union army and two of his sons in 1861 (Journal 6:1:8).
16 See anonymous reviews in The Nation 6/139[1868]: 176; The Atlantic Monthly 21/126[1868]: 512; The North American Review 106/219[1868]: 725–727; and The American Naturalist 2/3 [1868]: 156–158; and note in The New Englander and Yale Review 27/3 [1868].
17 Only Cooper (1939: 73) cited Morgan (Citation1868: 240–241) on Ojibwe trapping in debates over Algonquian family hunting grounds in the 1910s-1930s.
18 ‘Guide for Undergraduate Majors and Graduate Students in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania (compiled 1936–37)’, p. 18, Hallowell Papers, Guide for undergrads, etc. 1936–37, also preserved in Wallace’s papers, in his ‘Courses Taken—Bibliographies, Anthropological’ [in 1946–1950] over a decade later. The University of Pennsylvania’s library has neither Morgan (Citation1868) nor the Naiman-inspired Dover reprint (1986).
19 See, for example, Brown Citation2017: 69–122, 183–193; Hurn Citation2008.