The Indigenous forest for the settler tree: Ryan C. Hellenbrand, Into the Woods and Back Again: An Environmental Kin Study of German Settler Ecologies in the Upper Midwest, PhD dissertation, The University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The Indigenous forest for the settler tree: Ryan C. Hellenbrand, Into the Woods and Back Again: An Environmental Kin Study of German Settler Ecologies in the Upper Midwest, PhD dissertation, The University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2025

20May25

Abstract: Forests in the United States have long been and continue to be contested places of cultural
identity. Lumbering and European settlement in the forests of Minnesota, Wisconsin and
Michigan radically and violently disrupted Indigenous ecological relationships to their
homelands. Yet the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin has a developed a world-renowned forestry
program that supports their self-determination across multiple domains. This dissertation
examines the genealogy of natural resource conservation in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest,
specifically the connections between national identity, Indigenous self-determination and the
implementation of forestry. This is a comparative landscape ethnography of German modes of
monumentality: the Endres Chapel at Indian Lake County Park, Wisconsin; the Hermann
Monument in New Ulm, Minnesota; and the implementation of forestry in the cutover region of
the Northwoods. I analyze how histories of place and belonging intersect with forestry in
practice today. The Endres chapel outside of Madison, Wisconsin instantiates familial narratives
of settler belonging to these Indigenous homelands; the Hermann the German statue in New
Ulm, Minnesota as an embodiment of German nationalism in the U.S.; and lastly the
implementation of German Scientific Forestry responds to the ecological devastation of the
Cutover to maintain settlers’ symbolic and material claims to Indigenous homelands.

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