Indigenes to migrants to settlers: Mary L. Mullen, ‘How the Irish Became Settlers: Metaphors of Indigeneity and the Erasure of Indigenous Peoples’, New Hibernia Review, 20, 3, 2016, pp. 81-96 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenes to migrants to settlers: Mary L. Mullen, ‘How the Irish Became Settlers: Metaphors of Indigeneity and the Erasure of Indigenous Peoples’, New Hibernia Review, 20, 3, 2016, pp. 81-96

18Oct16

Excerpt: In an 1844 article in the London-based Fraser’s Magazine, Morgan Rattler opens his account “Of the Red Indian” with a story of an Irish landlord attending the Greenwich fair to see “a wild man!” This “wild man” seems to be a Native from North America: he appears with “face covered with a profusion of red, shaggy hair, a regular glib, nearly naked, and with a chain about his waist.” But as the landlord gets closer, he realizes that the man is one of his own Irish tenants, observing that “the savage seemed to display towards him some uncouth and uneasy signs of recognition.” This opening anecdote prepares the way for Rattler’s analysis, which depends upon a sustained comparison between the “Ojibbeways” of North America and the “Celtic Irish.”

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