« Triangular settler relations: Li-Chun Fang, Yushen Fang, ‘Colonial Encounters and Identity Formation: Dutch Colonizers, Hoklo Immigrants, and Indigenous Peoples in Seventeenth-Century Formosa’, Dutch Crossing, 2026

Absent settler colonialism: Emma Brennan Chapman, Disappearing Connections: War, Absence, and Kin in New France and New England, 1680-1740, PhD dissertation, UC Davis, 2026

17Oct26

Abstract: Cycles of violence and displacement engulfed Indigenous, French, and English groups in the area around what is now the border between Canada and northern New England as European settlers and trade pushed into Indigenous homelands throughout the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. These violent cycles led to long absences of family and kin members who were captured, injured or fleeing from violence. These absences had spiritual, economic, political, and emotional dimensions for European and Indigenous families who made up the societies and governments of northeastern North America in the colonial period. This dissertation argues that the concept of absence and absent people themselves were key elements of how Indigenous and invading European societies conceived of themselves, connected with each other, and built larger economic and political systems. The informal networks, altered relationships, and spiritual conceptions that families and kin relations built up to negotiate the problems of absence became the major ways that the competing polities in the area related to each other and claimed and resisted authority. As both Indigenous and European families innovated existing cultural traditions and legal or economic frameworks, they also incorporated the living absent into their societies, illustrating the strong influence that absent people had on the formations of culture and societies they were not physically present with. This dissertation examines those conceptions and the ways these individual navigations of absence from below formed culture and authority from below.


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