Lasting the frontier itself: Simon Wesley Huff,, Learning to Dwell in the Last Frontier: Women Writers and the Cultural Imagination of Colonial Alaska, 1867-1959, PhD dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Lasting the frontier itself: Simon Wesley Huff,, Learning to Dwell in the Last Frontier: Women Writers and the Cultural Imagination of Colonial Alaska, 1867-1959, PhD dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2025

06May25

Abstract: Learning to Dwell in the Last Frontier examines the role of female writers in shaping the literary and cultural history of Alaska’s colonial period (1867-1959), arguing that their works played a crucial but largely unacknowledged role in constructing and contesting the dominant frontier mythology. While Alaska has long been framed through hyper-masculine narratives of conquest and resource extraction, the writings of Eliza Scidmore, Elizabeth Robins, Esther Birdsall Darling, and Martha Martin complicate these tropes, engaging with themes of gender, colonialism, and environmental consciousness. By centering these writers, this study reconstructs a literary genealogy that challenges the conventional canon of Alaskan literature. Their texts trace Alaska’s transformation from a colonial outpost to a mythologized space of personal renewal and national identity. At the same time, they expose the contradictions of this transformation – particularly the marginalization of native presence and the authors’ ambivalent roles within the settler-colonial framework. This dissertation offers an alternative literary history of Alaska – one that foregrounds the complexities and contributions of women’s writing in the colonial period. In doing so, it reshapes our understanding of Alaska’s colonial past and illuminates its enduring cultural legacy.

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