Manifesting Destiny: a land education analysis of settler colonialism in Jamestown, Virginia, USA

Abstract

Globally, colonization has been and continues to be enacted in the take-over of Indigenous land and the subsequent conversion of agriculture from diverse food and useful crops to large-scale monoculture and c ash crops. This article uses a land education analysis to map the rise of the ideology and practices of Manifest Destiny in Virginia. Manifest Destiny is the culmination (and continuation) of material and discursive relations that serve as a cover story for the formation (and maintenance) of the settler colonial triad of settlers, Indigenous peoples, and slaves. The article theorizes the settler colonial triad, an important construct of land education that provides a lens through which to investigate political-economic and epistemological links between agriculture, settler colonialism, and environment.

Keywords:

• settler colonialism
• agriculture
• Manifest Destiny
• tobacco
• Jamestown
• Indigenous peoples

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Erratum

Acknowledgments

Previous versions of the article were presented at the American Educational Studies Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, October 2010; the International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry, Urbana-Champaign, IL, May 2011, the 32nd Annual Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, Dayton, Ohio, October 201, and the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC, Canada, April 2012. The author wishes to thank Eve Tuck for careful readings and suggestions along the way and the Environmental Education Research reviewers for their insights and suggestions.

Funding

Research for this paper was partially funded through a United University Professionals Professional Development Award Summer 2011, SUNY New Paltz, New York.

Notes

1. This concept is introduced in a radio interview between Patrick Wolfe and K. Kehaulani Kauanui http://www.indigenouspolitics.org/audiofiles/2010/Wolfe%20Settler%20Colonialism%202010.mp3.

2. In a radio interview between Patrick Wolfe and K. Kehaulani Kauanui, Wolfe calls this ‘franchise colonialism.’ (http://www.indigenouspolitics.org/audiofiles/2010/Wolfe%20Settler%20Colonialism%202010.mp3.Patrick). Tuck and Yang (2012) characterize it as ‘external colonialism’ (4).

3. Adapted from Paula Gunn Allen’s account in Pocahontas: Medicine woman, spy, entrepreneur, diplomat (2004). She is drawing from a sacred story of the Abenaki people collected by Natalie Curtis in The Indians’ Book (1968). There are many North American Indigenous stories of the origin of tobacco. I chose to use this one because the themes work with the purpose of this paper and Allen’s use of it in her book about the same era and geographical location.

4. It is beyond the scope of this study to investigate what that word might have meant to seventeenth century English settlers, but it seems possible that settler accounts helped to transform the meaning from ‘people of the woods’ toward its current meaning: ‘a person belonging to a primitive society’ (Merriam-Webster online dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/).