Taylor Spence

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I research, write, and paint American history as an independent, unaffiliated producer.
Supervisors: John Faragher, Joan Snyder, Jake Berthot, Malcolm Morley

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Papers by Taylor Spence

Rethinking the Colonial Encounter in the Age of Trauma

The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History , 2021

In the 'Age of Trauma', individual traumatic repetitions collect into an archive that signals the... more

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Spatial Survivance: Haudenosaunee Active Presence in the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands

Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalisms, 2023

In 1923 Deskaheh, a.k.a Levi General, a Cayuga political leader and speaker for the Six Nations (... more In 1923 Deskaheh, a.k.a Levi General, a Cayuga political leader and speaker for the Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) Council, traveled to England to deliver a message he hoped would gain him an audience with the King.1 Two years earlier, in 1921, the Northwest Mounted Police (the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP) had established a permanent post in his home at Grand River in central Ontario, part of a long series of moves by the Dominion of Canada to assert its control over Haudenosaunee people and property. This move came after more than forty years of conflict between the Six Nations and the Canadian government, which appeared bent on usurping the long-standing relationship forged between the British and the Haudenosaunee, and replacing it with its own paternalistic oversight, whose ultimate purpose appeared to be assimilation, erasure, and land expropriation.

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North American Colonial Agriculture

A Companion to American Agricultural History, 2022

This research explores the idea of forced knowledge transfer (of Indigenous agricultural knowledg... more

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The trauma consensus: history method in the age of trauma

Continuum

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Naming Violence in United States Colonialism

Journal of Social History , 2019

This article reexamines a highly public dispute between a powerful and well-connected Episcopal b... more This article reexamines a highly public dispute between a powerful and well-connected Episcopal bishop and his missionary priest, men both central to the gov-ernment's campaign of war and assimilation against Indigenous Peoples in the Northern Great Plains of the nineteenth-century United States. The bishop claimed that the priest had engaged in sexual intercourse with a Dakota woman named "Scarlet House," and used this allegation to remove the priest from his post. No historian ever challenged this claim and asked who Scarlet House was. Employing Dakota-resourced evidence, government and church records, linguistics , and onomastics, this study reveals that in actuality there was no such person as Scarlet House. Furthermore, at the time of the incident, the person in question was not a woman but a child. The church created a fictional personage to cover up what was taking place at the agency: sexual violence against children. After "naming" this violence, this article makes four key historical contributions about the history of US settler colonialism: It documents Dakota Peoples' agency, by demonstrating how they adapted their social structures to the harrowing conditions of the US mission and agency system. It situates the experiences of two Dakota families within the larger context of settler-colonial conquest in North America, revealing the generational quality of settler-colonial violence. It shows how US governmental policies actually enabled sexual predation against children and women. And, it argues that "naming violence" means both rendering a historical account of the sexual violence experienced by children and families in the care of the US government and its agents, as well as acknowledging how this violence has rippled out through communities and across generations.

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Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies The trauma consensus: a proposed method for researching and writing American histories

Trauma has the potential to change the way we understand, research, and write the histories of se... more Trauma has the potential to change the way we understand, research, and write the histories of settler colonial societies. Indigenous and African-American psychologists and sociologists have used trauma to develop the diagnoses of American Indian Historical Trauma (AI HT) and Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS). A growing awareness of trauma with the increased prevalence of trauma-related disorders (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD) offers historians and other social scientists an opportunity to establish a new consensus based on the shared historical trauma of the descendants of colonization and empire-building. This essay argues for the necessity of such a new consensus, and then, drawing on psychology, anthropology, literary studies, and historical theory, posits a new ‘trauma methodology’ for the creation of the histories of settler colonial societies, which includes the assessment of subject matter, research methods, timeline, and writing.

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The Canada Thistle: The Pestilence of American Colonialisms and the Emergence of an Exceptionalist Identity, 1783-1839

This paper locates one origin-point of American exceptionalist thinking to a ubiquitous weed of E... more

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Jeffersonian Jews: The Jewish Agrarian Diaspora and the Assimalitive Power of the Western Land, 1882-1930

Taylor Spence

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