Reversing the Flow: name reclamation and knowledge uncovering in Haudenosaunee territory (Doctoral Dissertation). SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, May 2024
Place Names and their Places: considering layers of language, landscape, and relief. Book chapter in New Directions in Linguistic Geography: Exploring Articulations of Space, Palgrave, 2022
Place Name Restoration in Haudenosaunee Territory: Frameworks for language and landscape (Master’s Thesis). SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, May 2019
Book manuscript in progress: Restoryation in Indigenous territory: dissolving settler narratives in the Adirondacks, and at Follensby Pond.
Project abstract
In [what is called] the Adirondacks region of Upstate New York, Indigenous historical and contemporary presences and lived histories are rich and deep. This book describes the decolonial land justice work of the author, in collaboration with others, at Follensby Pond: until recent years, the largest privately owned lake in the northeast United States, and the site of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Philosopher’s Camp,’ known within settler imaginations as a location of meaning within Transcendentalist histories. Working against the grain of significant settler narratives, land justice work being done at Follensby Pond must work to distinguish between layered and compounded sedimentary settler stories that larger form structures of violence, in order to undo them. This effort centers on restoryation, and the uplifting of Hodino̱hsho:nih and other Indigenous presences: as an interrogation of structures of power in a particular place; as a way of beginning and sustaining work that examines the cultural and ecological narratives that shape a place; and, perhaps most importantly, as a way of uncovering Indigenous and other non-colonial presences from colonial obscurement. As a part of this work, I suggest an embodied form of restoryation, enacted on the land as a part of critical and environmental work; I suggest also that restoryation, as a praxis, is able to dissolve some of these settler narratives in landscape, and dissolve also their power of obfuscation.
Note: For full text versions of published work, please see Sophie’s researchgate profile here, or reach out by email at sebrown@esf.edu