Thoreau as settler disaster: Andrew Wildermuth, ‘Foraging, Forging, Forgoing – or, Thoreau as Settler Disaster in the Age of Walker and Apess’, in Linda Hess, Sylvia Mayer, Katja Sarkowsky, Christoph Straub (eds), Environmental citizenship: politics, practices, representations, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2026, pp. 69-83 | settler colonial studies blog

Thoreau as settler disaster: Andrew Wildermuth, ‘Foraging, Forging, Forgoing – or, Thoreau as Settler Disaster in the Age of Walker and Apess’, in Linda Hess, Sylvia Mayer, Katja Sarkowsky, Christoph Straub (eds), Environmental citizenship: politics, practices, representations, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2026, pp. 69-83

29Jun26

Excerpt: In Concord, Massachusetts, a few years ago, I attended a two-week summer residency on the topic of Thoreau and social reform in the American Renaissance. On the final day, we discussed “Native American Rights in Antebellum America.” At the very start of the event, one of the event’s panelists, Linda Coombs, an historian and educator of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah, began with a question: “What Native American rights?” The mostly White audience stiffened. Coombs laughed. “What rights, really?” She offered this like it was the punch line everyone had long known was coming. “It just doesn’t compute,” she said. It was clear that Linda Coombs was unimpressed with and disinterested in both Henry Thoreau’s person and work. She dismissed Thoreau with turns of phrases that were startling, even sacrilegious, to many in the room – in “The Concord Colonial Inn,” which Thoreau’s family once owned, and where a young Thoreau roomed while studying at Harvard – and where, for the last weeks, many of us, myself included, had worshipped at and swum in his and Transcendentalism’s shrines. Coombs, on the other hand, referred to him as a settler and mocked his fame for spending years on Indigenous land. She also asked why it was only on our final day that we focused on Indigeneity in North America. These and other inquiries exacted a certain speechlessness – a general liberal confusion, at a conference about reform, in good liberal Massachusetts – that became utterly pervasive, palpable, indeed, in this windowless room in Thoreau’s literal basement.

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