The settler’s hill: Maya Charlton, “On This Very Hill”: Narratives of Conquest in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, PhD dissertation, Leigh University, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler’s hill: Maya Charlton, “On This Very Hill”: Narratives of Conquest in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, PhD dissertation, Leigh University, 2026

14Jul26

Abstract: A Lost Lady by Willa Cather reproduces a dominant cultural narrative that glorifies the aesthetic of the upper-class early settlers of the Western United States who accumulated wealth and property in the process of constructing a new colonial society. Cather does not entirely erase the losses experienced by Indigenous people as a direct result of colonization, but histories of land theft and colonial violence remain marginal to the venerable origin story of settlement in her novel. While Cather occasionally references both settler violence and an Indigenous presence, she works to separate these two traces of settler knowledge about conquest: settler characters generally enact or think of violence while erasing its racialized and colonized victims, and allusions to Indigenous people appear in recollections of seemingly peaceful conquest. I build on settler colonial theory to examine the mechanisms by which Cather occludes the harm of colonization, including through the transferal of the settler violence against Indigenous people onto non-human life, the privileging of upper-class settler narratives, and the implementation of a colonial temporal order. I examine how Cather’s faultless characterization of Captain Forrester, whose life story comes to stand for the experiences of early settlers, works to preserve a palatable narrative of Westward expansion and facilitates the cross-generational transmission of a glorified origin story within dominant collective memory.

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