Settler fantasies and their sympathies: Leila Ben Abdallah, ‘On Sympathies and the work of Public Things: Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s Challenge to Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian Statue and Settler Fantasy’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler fantasies and their sympathies: Leila Ben Abdallah, ‘On Sympathies and the work of Public Things: Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s Challenge to Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian Statue and Settler Fantasy’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2025

25May25

Abstract: Focusing on recent community efforts to repair Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian statue, this article reads the statue as a public thing. In doing so, I argue that sympathy active at the 1911 unveiling of Taft’s Indian statue and 2020 restoration capture what I call settler sympathy. Instead of granting the ability to see from the other’s perspective, I illustrate how settler sympathy relies on image and myth fundamental to sustaining the settler nation. I turn to the thought of Oneida activist-intellectual Laura Cornelius Kellogg to locate settler sympathy as well as another sympathy, what I call fraternal sympathy. Where settler sympathy takes fiction to make things public for settler gain, I argue that fraternal sympathy finds in fiction a means to make alternative places where publics thrive through things that do not annihilate but rather affirm self-determination.

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